Bang!
That was the sound of the shot across the bow of the entire hockey world when 2026 NHL draft top prospect Gavin McKenna announced that he would be playing the 2025-26 season for the Penn State Nittany Lions of the Big Ten, the highest-profile hockey conference in the NCAA. And with all due respect to the other conferences in NCAA Division 1 college hockey, it seems likely that profile gap will only widen in the coming years. There will be some people in the hockey world who will find this a controversial take, but we believe there is a good chance that the Big Ten becomes the second-best hockey league on the planet by the end of this decade.
First, let’s define the Big Ten. It is, by number of programs, the smallest conference in college hockey—which, in our view, will be advantageous for the conference.
The schools that currently have a hockey program in the Big Ten are as follows:
- Michigan
- Michigan State
- Minnesota
- Notre Dame
- Ohio State
- Penn State
- Wisconsin
All of these schools have very large enrolments, are generally high-quality academic institutions, and are household names in the United States.
But for the purposes of this discussion, the reason we see the Big Ten continuing to climb the ranks of hockey leagues around the world is a topic that we have covered extensively here at SkateGuard: name, image and likeness (NIL) deals.
One of the other common denominators of Big Ten programs is that they all have monster football programs. If you want to read more about why having a massive football program is going to mean that these Big Ten schools are going to have more NIL dollars to spend, you can read our piece on the recent House vs. NCAA ruling here . For now, let’s just accept the fact that they will have more dollars to spend than the rest.
This is where we circle back to Gavin McKenna. McKenna is often thought of as the next “franchise player” to come through the NHL draft, and he will be eligible for selection in 2026. He had been playing for the Medicine Hat Tigers in Canada’s Western Hockey League. He had 127 points in 56 games in the WHL as a 17-year-old last season.
Traditionally, the very top Canadian hockey players have seen themselves play two or three years in a major junior league (depending on whether their birthday is before or after the Sept. 15 deadline for turning 18) and then go straight to the NHL. McKenna has already played two seasons in Medicine Hat, but because he was born on Dec. 20, 2007, the expectation was that he would go back to the WHL for one more season before being selected in the 2026 draft.
Enter Penn State
The Nittany Lions were able to put a package together that reportedly included a US$700,000 (over $963,000 in Canadian dollars) NIL deal. This represents a sea change, for a number of reasons. We had already started to see the flow of top Canadian talent heading to the NCAA. In the last five NHL drafts, four Canadian players were selected with a Top 5 pick who have decided to play NCAA college hockey, including two first overall picks: Owen Power in 2021 and Macklin Celebrini in 2024. Another, Cayden Lindstrom, a fourth-overall pick of the Columbus Blue Jackets in 2024, has decided to not return to major junior hockey next season, and has signed with Michigan State. Of those five players, only Celebrini did not attend a Big Ten school.
With this kind of money on the table–with that US$700,000 for McKenna setting a precedent—we view it as highly likely that not only does the absolute top talent continue to funnel to these Big Ten schools, but the likelihood increases that they will stay longer at these schools. Lindstrom and Porter Martone are both players who have already been drafted (Martone taken sixth overall by the Philadelphia Flyers in the ’25 draft) and are going to be teammates at Michigan State this year. Maybe they will be ready for the NHL after this season. But if they aren’t, they would very likely be better off from a financial, lifestyle and very likely development perspective being at Michigan State for another year, rather than playing the American Hockey League—which is what has typically happened for 20-year-old prospects who aren’t quite ready for the big time.
Players on entry-level contracts playing in the AHL currently make somewhere in the neighbourhood of US$85,000 to US$90,000. Players with the pedigree of a Martone, Lindstro, or McKenna are going to command meaningfully more than that from a NIL deal. They get to play in better locations (some of the cities in the AHL are sketchy, at best!), with better facilities (most Big Ten hockey rinks, from a player resources perspective, are closer to the NHL than the AHL), and I believe the competition will only continue to get better.
As the Big Ten continues to increase the standard of play in the league from an already very high level, we could absolutely see it overtake the AHL as the second-best hockey league in North America in short order, if it hasn’t already. Some of it is simply a numbers game. As more and more of the top talent wants to play in that conference due to the dollars available, as well as the exposure and development benefits that come from competing against the best talent pool, the fact that there are only seven schools in the conference, rather than 32 teams in the AHL, means there is less dilution. To that point, later on in this article, we will provide our view on what the Top 10 hockey leagues in the world might look like in 2030. The Big Ten will certainly be on that list.
There are two main reasons that other conferences are not on the list:
- There are meaningfully more teams in the other “power conferences” in college hockey. The NCHC and Hockey East would be the next best conferences in college hockey, and they have nine and 11 teams, respectively.
- The lack of powerhouse football programs at the schools in those conferences. As of Aug. 12, 2025, the only schools inside the Top 100 rankings for the 2025 college football season, according to CBS Sports, were Arizona State (11th), Boston College (66th), UConn (76th) and Miami-Ohio (86th). Meanwhile, the Big Ten has four of the top 15, and the lowest ranking was Michigan State at 62nd.
This is what will allow those schools to consistently, year in and year out, spend top dollar on top talent, up to and including the Gavin McKenna’s of the world. If our thesis of the Big Ten passing the AHL does come to fruition, that would leave only the top European leagues as competition for the title of second-best hockey league in the world.
There, we started our evaluation thinking that there might be four leagues in Europe that would be up for consideration:
- The Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) – top pro league in Russia
- The National League (NL) – top pro league in Switzerland
- The Swedish Hockey League (SHL) – top pro league in Sweden
- Liiga – top pro league in Finland
When evaluating these four leagues, we generally ask ourselves two questions:
- What is the level of the top talent in the league?
- What is the quality of the “local” players that make up the majority of the rosters?
When you dive into these four leagues, we found that, particularly on the second point, we could eliminate the Swiss and Finnish leagues fairly quickly. In both leagues, the top teams had a number of players who could certainly play at the AHL level, maybe even fill out a “bottom six” forward spot or a “bottom pair” defenceman’s spot in the NHL. For example, two of the top five scorers in the Swiss league last season had played in the NHL the prior year: Austin Czarnik and Dominik Kubalik. Czarnik had one point in 34 games, and Kubalik had 15 points in 74 games. However, when you look at the prospect profiles of the rest of the rosters in these two leagues, they just don’t measure up.
The biggest competitor to the Big Ten would be the KHL. Most teams in the KHL have players that can almost certainly fill a bottom six/bottom pair role in the NHL, with the top players possessing even more ability than that. Ivan Demidov finished 27th in KHL scoring last year, and then joined the Montreal Canadiens for two games at the end of the regular season plus the playoffs, scoring four points in seven games total, and is expected to be a key component of the Canadiens attack this season.
On the other side of the competitive coin, while a sample size of one does not make a credible data set, it is interesting to look at the case of Nolan Moyle. He went from the University of Michigan in 2022-23, where he was the captain, to play for Kunlun Red Star of the KHL in 2023-24. That gives us something of an apples-to-apples comparison.
| Year | Team/League | Points Per Game | Plus/Minus | +/- Rank on Team |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022-23 | Michigan/Big Ten | 0.175 | +4 | 17th |
| 2023-24 | Kunlun/KHL | 0.2 | -4 | 2nd * |
* = among players who played at least 50% of the team’s games
In 2022-23 with Michigan, his teammates included Adam Fantilli and Luke Hughes, who both played significant roles for their respective NHL teams the next season, as well as Mackie Samoskevich, who scored 15 goals this past season for the Stanley Cup winning Florida Panthers. In 2023-24 with Kunlun, his teammates included former NHLers such as Brandon Yip, Ryan Merkley and Jeremy Smith—talented players in their own right, but tough to make the argument that they ever had the impact of a Fantilli or Hughes.
Again, we always have to be careful looking at a sample size of one, but the case of Moyle certainly points to comparable environments between the Big Ten and the KHL a couple of years ago, and I think most would argue that the Big Ten has only strengthened since then.
We only see this balance continuing to move in favour of the Big Ten. With the monster football programs at all the schools in the conference ensuring that there will be meaningful dollars to go around and chase the highest level talent, there is no reason that the level of play in the Big Ten can’t continue to elevate. The AHL is still a stronger league right now. The KHL probably is as well. But if the current market environment for players stays the same, where these Big Ten programs have meaningful dollars to throw at top talent, it is very possible that changes.
There are other changes in the works that are no doubt going to have an impact. Part of the new collective bargaining agreement for the NHL is a commitment by the league to attempt to reach a deal with the AHL and the Canadian Hockey League to allow one 19-year-old per NHL team to play in the AHL, rather than having to go back to major junior hockey. While we view this proposal as progressive, it is also fair to ask whether that player would not be better off playing in the Big Ten rather than the AHL.
Based on our evaluation of the top hockey leagues around the world, we anticipate that by 2030, the 10 best hockey leagues in the world might look something like this:
- The NHL
- The Big Ten (NCAA)
- The KHL (Russia)
- The AHL (North America)
- The SHL (Sweden)
- The NL (Switzerland)
- Liiga (Finland)
- DEL (Germany)
- ECHL (North America)
- ICEHL (Austria)
There are plenty of other great hockey leagues in the world. Beyond the 10 leagues above, the three major junior leagues in Canada, the other “power conferences” in the NCAA, the USHL, the Czech Extraleague, the EIHL in the U.K., and even the second leagues in countries like Russia and Sweden are all places where great players, teams and overall level of play can be found.
2030 is a long way away in many respects. A lot can happen in the five years until then. But given the landscape we are currently observing, it will be very interesting to watch whether some of the forces that have driven the likes of Gavin McKenna, Porter Martone and other elite hockey talents to the Big Ten will drive the level of play in that league to the heights we have hypothesized above. Stay tuned!
