“I think it’s a great opportunity for him,” Predators assistant GM Jeff Kealty said. “Kids are a little bit older, little bit stronger, can shoot the puck a little bit better. It’s going to be more of a challenge for him and a good step for him.”

A potential reorganization of the North American development model could result in players age 16-18 opting for the CHL and then spending their age 19 and 20 seasons playing NCAA hockey. To that point, MacKenzie said the majority of the approximately 220 new players entering the CHL this season are in that 16-18 age range, with a large component coming from the United States because those players now can maintain NCAA eligibility.

However, the age range also could begin to skew older in the CHL as players get squeezed out of NCAA programs prior to their 20th birthday. In previous seasons, NCAA-bound players might spend their age 19 season in the United States Hockey League and then start college at age 20. Now that roster spot might not be there because an 18-year-old from the CHL is coming in as a true freshman, and that older prospect would then go to the CHL at age 20 as an “over-ager.”

There’s also an additional import player slot, allowing each CHL team to carry three players (up from two) from Europe, including potentially 19- or 20-year-olds who otherwise would have stayed in their domestic leagues.

As for whether the CHL will look younger or older moving forward, MacKenzie said, “I think it’s too early to tell. There’s so many other parts to this, in terms of what the rules around it are, in terms of player movement. I think we’re going to have to wait and see. And I think we’ve got to be careful we don’t make too many assumptions based on six months of data.”

The new model also has brought about a new approach to finding players. Each of the three CHL leagues has bantam drafts of 15- and 16-year-olds separated by regions in Canada and the U.S., as well as the CHL import draft.

NCAA teams with an ocean of new players to pick from are devising new ways to find the right players for their systems.

When Dane Jackson took over as coach at North Dakota in April, one of his first moves was to hire Bryn Chyzyk as general manager to help oversee recruiting.

“I think there has been some teams that didn’t call them a GM, but they had guys more and more on the road, watching more and more,” Jackson said. “It is something that we were kind of talking about as a staff, and that just kind of pushed it over the edge when we saw the CHL open up.

“Recruiting is such a big part of building your team in college. You can coach your butt off, but you still need good players to win. I think along the way, we just knew that we had to allocate more time to the pure recruiting. Bryn Chyzyk is going to be out there a lot. … Having Bryn being the main guy out there, and really kind of directing and focusing our approach, is an important element. We knew we had to make that move.”

Players say the jump from junior hockey to pro, especially the American Hockey League, can be more difficult than the jump from the AHL to the NHL. Having that NCAA stopover for 18- and 19-year-olds could ease that challenge.

“They’re just playing against bigger and stronger players,” said Horcoff, who also is GM of Grand Rapids, the Red Wings’ AHL affiliate. “The game is faster, playing against older players; there are some 24-year-olds in college. So I just think for some of these kids that aren’t quite strong enough for pro hockey yet, it’s a nice buffer. It’s a nice place to go as kind of a stopover, to play at a level that’s a little faster, a little bit bigger and a little stronger.”

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Though NCAA hockey is in the headlines in part because of the McKenna move, MacKenzie said the future of the CHL remains bright.

Besides McKenna and Verhoeff, most of the top talent for the 2026 NHL Draft will play in the CHL this season, a group that includes Niagara (OHL) forward Ryan Roobroeck, Windsor (OHL) forward Ethan Belchetz, Spokane (WHL) forward Mathis Preston and Vancouver (WHL) defenseman Ryan Lin.

The Hlinka Gretzky Cup, an annual elite international summer under-18 tournament that includes some of the best players entering their NHL draft season, featured 60 CHL players across the eight teams this year. That included all 24 players with Canada and 13 with the U.S., the most since 2000.

“I think our philosophy has been, and will continue to be, the CHL develops players to play professional hockey,” MacKenzie said. “That’s what we develop for. We’re seeing a significant amount come in, and then when they’re getting to be older and making decisions on how they think the best way to get to pro hockey is going to be … I think we have to sort of see where that goes and see how it plays out for those players. I think we feel pretty confident that we have a proven track record of, if you play in your 19-year-old year, your post draft years, with the CHL, that you’re going to continue to develop.”

There’s so much unanswered that could start to come into focus this season.

“It’ll be very interesting to see how it shakes out in the next few years, whether [NCAA hockey] will be a normal path for a lot of top players, or if it’ll still be kind of mixed,” Boston College coach Greg Brown said. “I think with the group that’s coming this first year, if there are a lot of success stories, they do well in college and transition right into pro hockey successfully, then I think it’ll become a normal path. I’m excited to see how it turns out.”

NHL.com senior draft writer Mike G. Morreale and NHL.com independent correspondents Stefen Rosner and Lou Korac contributed to this report