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No changes coming to CHL-NHL agreement: Branch

2015 NHL Draft - Portraits

SUNRISE, FL - JUNE 26: Mitchell Marner poses for a portrait after being selected fourth overall by the Toronto Maple Leafs during the 2015 NHL Draft at BB&T Center on June 26, 2015 in Sunrise, Florida. (Photo by Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images)

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Every year, a handful of NHL teams have to decide whether to keep a teenage player or send him back to his CHL club.

What’s not an option is to send that teenager to the AHL. The CHL and NHL have an agreement that forbids that.

And according to CHL commissioner David Branch, that agreement isn’t about to change.

“So far the National Hockey League has not expressed any viewer opinion that it should be changed,” Branch said recently, per the Canadian Press. “Now we know time to time when there’s an NHL team that thinks, ‘Gee I’d like to place him in our AHL franchise setting,’ that always comes back into this discussion. It’s only driven in a few isolated situations.”

If, for example, Jonathan Drouin had been allowed to join Tampa Bay’s AHL squad after being drafted in 2013, that’s perhaps where he would’ve gone. Instead, he was sent back to dominate the Q again.

Jared McCann, traded yesterday to Florida, would’ve been another teenage AHL candidate, had it been allowed. The Canucks chose to keep him last season, but they were worried the NHL would wear him down (which it did).

Next year, the Maple Leafs may have a similar worry with diminutive forward Mitch Marner, who just turned 19 and has nothing left to prove in the CHL. The AHL won’t be an option for him either.

Some people think that’s unfair, that the agreement should be amended, that the CHL is actually looking out for its own best interests, not the players’.

Not Branch.

“My view of it is when hockey people get together in an unemotional environment, without specific examples, they say the best thing to do is play in the CHL or NHL,” Branch said. “That’s not something we push at (NHL clubs), that’s what hockey people have collectively agreed to.”