Could potentially be a good idea but I see the Latvians dominating.
There's Belarus and Poland bordering too and whilst Belarus is land locked, they're an okay hockey nation who along with Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, could grow much more.
The more games against domestic teams of neighbouring nations, the better. It allows for teams and nations to see exactly where they stand against each other, see how they do things differently and perhaps work together in some way.
The BHL sounds like one step forward, and that's great. I'm not very aware of what the development system is like in those Baltic nations but I don't think it would be too far wrong to say that they need to do more, and increase the quality of the development programmes. There's some very good hockey nations a short distance away, Finland, Russia, Sweden.. Perhaps even as far as Czech Republic. One thing which is important will be for these nations to accept any help offered to them, it's vital that they don't simply try to keep things entirely in house and keep it their way. That is how it is here in Great Britain, our governing body will not accept any help from the IIHF and our development systems are poor. Besides our top league, which is at a good level because of it being foreign player heavy, everything else is awful. The key to growing the sport is to work with other nations, play more games in junior level and bring in more competitiveness. The BHL appears to tick two of those boxes and as I have little to no knowledge of the junior systems over there, I can't comment much further but I definitely see this as a step forward.
