No. The best it can give you is a very general sense that perhaps the CHL is not producing as many dynamic offensive players as it once was, but you'd have to do a lot more checking to get anything but a vague impression from that glance. And whether it is or is not producing more talented scorers still says relatively little about it's overall quality as a development league, as there are many areas of hockey skill and ability which do not necessarily show up in scoring stats.
Looking at any one player will tell you absolutely nothing about anything but that one player. I would suggest plotting a distribution of player ages for the top scorers and comparing it to the age distribution for the league as a whole, with subsets of CHL players and non-CHL players. Would it show any shift towards older-on-average CHL players with higher scoring totals compared to their non-CHL counterparts? Would that indicate any signs that perhaps a new crop of CHL scorers is not rising as quickly to replace the old guard Recchi's? I have no idea. Just by glancing at an expanded list of the top-60, I can pick as many next-generation Thornton, Tanguay, Richards, Nash , Doan, Nash, Briere, Ribeiro, Ryder, Spezza, Dumont types as old-guard types.
More necessary complication.
A glance at the top 60 reveals that 42% (25/60) come from the CHL. A glance at last year's entry draft indicates that 53% (36/68) come from the CHL. How do these numbers compare to previous years, and how do we account for the evolution of increased scouting and overdue attention being given to the European countries? In 1994, drafting Europeans in the top-2 rounds was relatively well-established, 63% (33/52) players in the top-2 rounds were drafted from the CHL.
Where do you draw the lines, and what are the criteria by which we would judge any evaluation in the offensive calibre of CHL products? It's not a simple problem. (Well, actually it is pretty simple all things considered, but it's not trivial, and not really within the scope of anything I'd be willing to do without having somebody pay me for it!
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I would question how you can be so sure that there is "absolutely nothing wrong with the CHL". I can't be sure myself. It would take a very thorough analysis, and I suspect that any trends that came out of such an analysis would not show any large problems, if all factors were taken into consideration adequately. The CHL seems to be producing lots of nice NHLers. It is probably hit and miss on an individual organisation basis, but I would hazard to say that it does a better job of preparing players for the duration, rigour, style of NHL seasonal play. Nevertheless, I think we were only talking about the offensive talent side of the developmental equation, so we're supposed to be leaving aside the consideration of how superior the CHL may or may not be in all other important areas. It is certainly a strong league. The question, however, is: Is it just as strong as it used to be in terms of developing talented offensive players? If international hockey is undergoing a "breakthrough", why is the CHL not also undergoing a similar breakthrough? (There are some obvious answers to that, of course).
Certainly there are cyclical considerations too. Again, a thorough analysis would be required to identify these. My general impression is that maybe the CHL went through a bit of a slight dip with regards to offensive talent in the past decade, but that a new crest seems to be forming lately.
Good heavens, no, the red line removal was only suggested as a minimal little bit of occasional extra excitement and subtle encouragement for a marginally more open-minded offensive approach then as a cure-all for any perceived developmental shortcomings of the league as a whole! There have been whole series of articles, TV shows, exposes, and probably tomes of posts on boards like these dissecting the different developmental styles, and no definitive "solutions" have ever emerged, nor will they. I think Hockey Canada has in recent years emerged from something of a self-examination in which a lot of misplaced panic had originally led some people to believe that we needed to adopt some of the approaches of some of the other countries (mostly at levels before major junior). But I doubt much has come or will come of it. There is nothing to be gained in running around copying other programs at the first potential signs of a minor cyclical downswing. (Maybe it's like the stock market.
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No disagreement there. It will always be an interesting question that can be discussed for days on end, but there are no right or wrong answers, IMO.