After receiving literally hundreds of emails, and hundreds of social media comments from BCHL fans and supporters, TJHN is providing the following facts as supplied and publicly available on the BCHL. The attacks from BCHL fans who simply believe league press releases were quite amusing in some circumstances.
Lets review the reasons why the BCHL left the CJHL and Hockey Canada as they claimed publicly.
The BCHL wanted access to sign the best European, Asian, and American players available. The BCHL said they wanted to be able to sign the best 16 and 17 year old players from out of Province and out of the country. The BCHL said they wanted to develop more players from British Columbia.
Here are your BCHL provided statistics of leading scorers and the country they are from: Elite Prospects – BCHL Stats 2023-2024
For those of you needing help, just click on each player and you can see how old they are and where their home town is. It only takes a few minutes to see that the BCHL is not developing more British Columbia players, but that they are not getting top European players, and the players from out of Province are almost always over 18. But those are just the facts and they are not supporting the BCHL so we understand many people will chose to ignore those facts.
Here are your BCHL goalie statistics: Elite Prospects – BCHL Stats 2023-2024
Once again, not one of the BCHL claims made for leaving the CJHL and Hockey Canada are supported by the actual facts provided by the BCHL.
Here is the breakdown of where players are coming from, again provided by the BCHL.
Clearly, the BCHL is not getting top European players. Twenty seven total European players on seventeen teams in the BCHL and none of them being a major prospect. Again, just the facts.
More than thirty five percent of the BCHL players are not Canadian. How can the BCHL claim of developing more Canadian players be supported by having more than one third of your league imported from outside of Canada.
TJHN has had a policy of not using specific players as examples of false or misleading league propaganda. Since 2011 TJHN has not exposed players to the pressures that some league and team personell may use if they were mentioned publicly.
We encourage all BCHL fans who want the truth about NCAA commitments, to actually look at the commitments claimed by the BCHL, the players who are claimed, and see when that commitment was actually made. What you will find is a majority of players made their NCAA commitment before playing a single game in the BCHL. You will find the BCHL claiming commitments from players who made their commitment while in the USHL, NAHL, NCDC, other Junior A, U18 and U16. You will also find that the vast majority are American players.
Fans should learn to actually read BCHL press releases instead of interpret them. When the BCHL claims two hundred or more NCAA commitments, a majority of those commitments are from other leagues.
When the BCHL claims 400 or more “ALUMNI” playing NCAA hockey it does not mean that those players got their commitment while in the BCHL. It only means they played in the BCHL at some point.
If, fans do the math, it is mathmatically impossible for the BCHL to make 200 commitments per year, and the NAHL have 200, USHL to have 200, and all the other Tier II leagues in Canada and the US to make hundreds more commitments when there are a maximum of 400 roster spots available from year to year.
- 40 BCHL players have committed during the 2023-24 season
- 33 current players earned their commitments in a previous BCHL season
Forty is not two hundred in case you need a math review.
If the BCHL had publicly said, that they left Hockey Canada to save money, to have more imports regardless of quality, and to expand as they wish to be self governing, not one person would question those statements. In fact if those were the reasons given publicly, nearly everyone in hockey would have understood, and a vast majority would support their reasoning. But thats not what happened.
The problem began with the propaganda. Not once has TJHN said the BCHL is not a good league. In fact it is always represented in the TJHN Top Twenty. The problem is the repeated misleading information and in some cases outright lies.
If you dont like these facts, as provided by the BCHL, please email them and ask them to correct these facts to better fit the narrative they are trying to create.
