The Prospect Games start tomorrow (Saturday at 8 PM EDT on DetroitRedWings.com and Victory+; Sunday at 7 PM EDT on DetroitRedWings.com and Victory+) between the Detroit Red Wings and Dallas Stars, and the Detroit News’s Ted Kulfan discusses the demise of the Traverse City prospect tournament, which involved teams’ desires to host their own tournaments–and cost:
The Wings and Stars played two games last year and will do so again this weekend, although not in Traverse City. They’ll play at the Comerica Center in Frisco, Texas, the Stars’ practice facility.
The plan is to alternate between Traverse City and Frisco hosting the event.
The Traverse City-based prospects tournament began in 1998. At its peak, the eight teams played four games in five days with many of the daily sessions at Centre ICE Arena sold out or close to it.
More than 700 players who participated in the tourney played at least one NHL game, a testament to its quality. Pavel Datsyuk, Henrik Zetterberg, Lucas Raymond, Marco Kasper, Jamie Benn, Rick Nash and Jason Robertson are just a few of the players who competed as unproven young players and grew into NHL stars.
But as years passed, many NHL organizations began to have options closer to their own cities with similar tournaments born across the league landscape. The cost of housing some 20-25 prospects and staff in most markets was much cheaper than Traverse City in mid-September.
“Over the last three or four years, we’ve gone from eight (teams) down to two for different reasons,” general manager Steve Yzerman said last year after the two Dallas games in Traverse City. “Teams wanted to do different things. Some didn’t want to play four games. Some wanted to save the expense and not have to travel to Traverse City. They’re able to do different things.”
Continued (paywall); it’s just a big disappointment to those of us who believed in the TC prospect tournament to see it go elsewhere.
Just like everything else now a days, it all comes down to cost (even though teams are raking in record profits). The TC prospect tournament was truly a special event. Always looked forward to you on-site giving us full player evaluations at a time when there wasn’t much coverage or streams.