Yeah... super lame and very unfortunate. The top teams playing the worst teams definitely don’t look forward to it. I know for a fact that when a certain top tier team plays the lower teams, they don’t hit.
(And the final scores are usually 10-0 or 15-1 ) And because of that, the games different.
If they did hit, it wouldn’t be pretty. And who benefits from that?
This is simply evidence that the system is broken in multiple ways. At AA If there are 1, 2 or 3 teams that are simply able to smoke the rest of the other teams in the division 98% of the time, then it shows that those teams most likely should be encouraged to move up to play AAA. But the CAHA system along with the geographical hurdles to playing other AAA teams around the country, makes that something the AA teams are unlikely to want to pursue. This season, we have a team that has already beaten -- what, like 6 AAA teams including major year teams. That's an indictment of the system and rules we have, because anyone who understands the rules can't possibly blame the team or club in question.
There's this false narrative going that teams don't get pressured or even downright forced to go down. For the last 3 years, there has been significant downwards movement of many teams. It exists, it happens in many cases, and the flight system didn't change anything in that regard. In my experience a lot of parents have no idea where their team stands at the beginning of a season. Even the coaches don't really know, especially if the team is a hybrid team. Blaming the parents for whatever problems might exist in the system is a cop out. In my opinion no team enjoys being part of a blowout, on either side of the equation, but it's far worse to be on the losing side. What's silly is the notion that this is a problem that can be fixed, or even needs to be fixed, because it can't be. The vast majority of ice hockey games have a winner and loser. In every league and every division at every level of hockey there are blowouts, but I don't know of another locale that is so obsessed and preoccupied with trying to insure that the best teams never ever have to particpate in a game where they smoke another team that they are just far better than. When it gets to be a situation where a top level team is winning almost all of their games easily it's clearly more complicated than pointing a finger at a team or 2 that made a bad decision, or worse yet is part of an organization that is motivated to place teams at certain levels to maintain their eligibility to have other teams at higher levels of competition across multiple age groups.
