You are speaking from a perspective whereby your Jr.B team shares a primary affiliation with the the Jr.A team. As a result, these players (should the rule change in the direction you imply) could play an unlimited number of games with the A team and then still play for the team that they signed with (given they are first year). However, for an unaffiliated Jr.B team/player - the player in question could only play a maximum of 7 games regardless. Unaffiliated teams would allow players to gain the experience of playing up as well, but their opportunity happens to be much less because of the amount of games they are told they may play. What an advantage to the affiliated teams! Imagine the thought of actually limiting experience because you come from an unaffiliated team, while affiliated players (your competition), can gain as much as they choose. Of course players are rarely if ever ready straight out of Jr.B - but sometimes they are. I also agree that playing Jr.A is great for kids, but lets consider this based on argument that kids are away early in the season...
Guys that play in the states will play until Memorial Day Weekend (if they are lucky). For arguments sake, lets be generous and say that the kids at school don't get back until the end of May. The A season didn't begin until the end of the first week of May, by which time I think most Jr.A teams have played 6-7 games. This gives the guys a good opportunity to play up, gain experience... and should they play well enough even crack the squad. Also, because the A team only would have played ~1/3 of their season - it gives them an opportunity to go back to their team if they didn't make the A team and easily play the required % of games in order to qualify for the B playoffs.
If the rule must change, it needs to change for ALL teams. Here is an easy fix: Max out the number of games that players can be called up to 7, for ANY team - affiliate or not. Put some responsibility on Jr.A management to fill out a roster while accounting for variability (school), and maybe even make them do some scouting so that they call up a variety of players from different centres so that we can give the opportunity to more players to gain experience (if thats what we are really interested in). However, this just further cloudy what should be a very simple rule... and I believe it is simple as it stands right now: Player availability and other variables aside, to me, the simple fact is that a player that plays most of his games in Jr.A... is a Jr.A player. He may be the 19-21st guy on their roster meaning that (heaven forbid) he may have to sit games down the stretch... but if they needed him to play X amount of games such that he could not have played the same number in Jr.B... he belongs in that league. To what capacity he belongs there, is up the the management and coaches to decide. A decision that should have been reached or at least forecasted when the season started.
Posted on Jul 20, 2012, 6:58 AM from IP address 65.92.42.101