DallasStars.com’s Mike Heika has posted a column about the Stars hosting this weekend’s pair of Prospect Games between the Stars’ prospects and the Red Wings’ prospects:
Current Stars GM Jim Nill helped start the prospect tournament when he was assistant GM with the Red Wings back in 1998, and it became a successful eight-team affair for a couple of decades. It started to thin in recent years as more options became available for the participating teams and the cost of getting to a valued northern vacation spot for 5-6 days got to be pretty pricey. So, the tournament was reduced to two teams, and this year the Stars and Red Wings will shift their games to Frisco instead.
That can be a good thing and a bad thing. On one hand, the players don’t get the full experience of bonding in a fantastic camp setting with prospects from seven other NHL teams and plenty of things to do when you’re not playing. On the other hand, they also don’t have to go to Northern Michigan, then back to Dallas, then down to Cedar Park, then back to Dallas in a hectic replay of Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
“Now that we look back, I do think it might have been too much,” Nill said on Tuesday as he prepares to host games this Saturday and Sunday at Comerica Center and then roll straight into NHL camp on Wednesday in Frisco. “You had four games in five days that were pretty intense, and then you fly those guys right into camp. There’s no time to rest and there is a chance you can get banged up, so when it was at its height, it was probably a little too much.
“Here, we get two games, and I think that’s perfect,” Nill added. “The first one, you get a chance to shake off the rust, and the second one, you should be up and running, and then you go right into camp.”
It also gives Stars fans the benefit of seeing these games in person – and that is a real treat. In my time viewing the games at Centre Ice Arena in Traverse City, I’ve been struck by the level of competition. By taking a bunch of young 20-somethings and letting them go head-to-head, the intensity is significantly higher. When we get to the real NHL exhibition games, you have a mix of veterans and “kids” and there is usually no real flow. The veterans probably aren’t as engaged as you might like and are waiting around for the regular season to start. The kids are hesitant to do too much for fear of overstepping their “place” in the game. But in these prospect games, the top players go against the top players and you get full on vitriol.
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You get to see a live performance of the youngest players before training camp starts, and that can be pretty revealing.
“We just thought it would be good to give the prospects a little bit of a head start, and it was probably one of the best things we did,” Nill said of the original tournament plan. “Players didn’t have to jump right in with NHL guys in camp, they played against their peers, and we also used it for tryouts and found several players that way. The level of hockey for this time of year is off the charts. They want to show each other what you can do and they want to show management what they can do. It’s a great thing to watch.”
