FIVE MINUTE MAJOR CHL awards, playoffs, and more.

It’s a new week and that means more major junior hockey talk.

First with the news side of things, it was announced Tuesday the Spokane Chiefs had received the WHL Business award. The award is presented annually to the WHL Club that best exemplifies giving back to the community and producing an electrifying game-day experience for fans.

Another unique piece of news is that the WHL awards an official of the year. This year it was announced Tuesday Mike Langin had been awarded the Allen Paradice Memorial Trophy as WHL Official of the Year for the 2024-25 WHL Regular Season.

As of Wednesday, in the WHL the Portland Winterhawks and Spokane Chiefs were set to battle in the Western Conference Championship Series. In the Eastern Conference, the Medicine Hat Tigers were awaiting their opponent that was to be decided in a game seven Wednesday night. Their opponent would be either the Calgary Hitmen of the Lethbridge Hurricanes.

While the playoffs continue to progress there’s the fact next season and the one after that will look much different. It’ll look different because of the expansion of the Penticton Vees next season and a yet to be named Chilliwack franchise the season after.

This will not only increase the number of teams in the WHL, but its lead on the other two major leagues, the OHL and QMJHL.

There were rumors that have since seemingly died that a new league was going to launch on the west coast to rival the Junior-A BCHL and USHL.

Since that didn’t happen and there are arenas without hockey in the western half of the US, instead of having a Memorial Cup host team, how about a fourth league? This is all purely speculative as there’s been no talk of a fourth major junior league.

In a perfect world with additional expansion, a new league would only include US teams and take the current WHL US Division teams. Although the door shouldn’t be shut on bringing in teams in British Columbia if that were to be necessary if this ever happened.

That would drop the number of teams in the WHL, but there are markets that the WHL could tap into including former market and current BCHL market Cranbrook. After all, that’s what the league is doing with Penticton and Chilliwack.

The league could tap into a current ECHL market in Boise as the Victoria Royals did when that franchise moved from Chilliwack.

The league could add a team in Idaho Falls where there’s currently a USPHL Junior-A team. They could also add teams in California such as Stockton that used to have the AHL’s Stockton Heat who have since moved to Calgary.

Billings, Montana has an arena but no team so one could be placed there as well. These are just a few cities that could work if this were to come to fruition.

Sure, travel would be long at times, but it could work out well in the end.

Once each of the four major junior leagues finishes its postseason, they could be seeded one through four with the one seed playing four and the two seed facing the three seed.

This would eliminate the need for a host team as well, which would potentially create a more competitive field at a neutral site.