The AHL isn’t a good “development” league either. The skill goes to the NHL while the top checkers, of which the CHL develop a plenty, stay in the AHL.
Hence it’s more or less impossible to play a constructive well organized game there. But it’s good short term for players to straight out a few bad habits in and get used to NA ice. But I think we saw from someone like Marek Hrivik how much “development” goes on in the AHL. When ever he got called up to the NHL he had no clue what to do, how to move the puck, what was going on around him and so forth. Hrivik is a talented hockey player and he is certainly not dumb, but he wasn’t developed at all in the AHL.
Send a talented kid to the AHL and the best checkets in the world and all goons pushed out of the NHL will use him as practice target for 72 games a year.
I don’t know if KHL kids are more out of shape than NA kids. We called out both Lemieux and Howden for not being where they needed to be physically last season. I think some kids use it as an excuse for being out of shape. Buchnevich said that there were no weights in Cherepovets. That’s of course a joke. Russians have always been gym rats.
The way the game in the NHL is played right now, I think the farm team in the AHL set-up is down right crappy. Kids will focus on the wrong things. I would much rather have a kid play in the SM-liiga than the AHL. While the AHL can be a good stop gap for a kid adjusting to the NA game for a few months.