Thoughts on Development Camp
Unpacking a divisive issue amongst high-level practitioners
Every year, Coach Greg Revak puts together a Twitter thread with clips from NHL teams’ development camps. Here’s the 2026 edition:
This year, like, most other years, I receive messages from minor hockey coaches to Twitter anons to NHL staffers about how certain teams do a piss-poor job of organizing their on-ice sessions.
It’s all very conflicting to me.
So what is an NHL development camp?
This was my first, imperfect attempt at answering the question.
The players who show up at an NHL dev camp are all extremely skilled athletes, but they’re also not yet ready to play in the NHL.
Ideally I’d like to know 1) what they’re good at, 2) what they’re not so good at and 3) whether they can bridge the gap between 1 and 2 with a minimum of opportunity.
In recent years, the Montreal Canadiens have done good job of creating a favorable environment for such wildlife observation and photography, so to speak.
Unfortunately, the compressed dev camp schedule doesn’t fully serve the players. There’s the various departments that demand face time to do their work and (sometimes) justify their existence. There’s the language barriers that prevent many players from understanding what’s going on, nevermind expressing the best of themselves. Et cetera.
As in many other parts of life, it’s easy to hate on how a dev camp is run, much harder to actually participate in running one.
How many days?
How many invitations?
On-ice sessions or no ice?
How many practices?
Stations? Small area games? Which constraints?
Gym? How much & how hard?
So on and so forth
Anyway. Here’s the definitive answer to the question what is an NHL development camp:
It’s three days in the year.
