100 Degree Hockey Data Visualization
Professional tryout contracts
After a post-COVID surge in '21–22, PTO usage has dropped to historic lows
Peak
431
2021–22
Current
131
2025–26 (adj.)
21-yr avg
224
PTOs / season
Per-team low
4.0
2024–25
Adjustments account for shortened seasons (COVID-19). Toggle adjustments to see raw per-team averages. Tap bars for details.
Travis Morin. Greg Rallo. Jordie Benn.
All significant Texas Stars players who started on professional tryouts. This season, the team has signed just one, Cross Hanas, and that was pre-season not in-season.
Texas is not alone. Across the league, PTOs are down drastically from their heights in the mid 2010s. Even adjusted for the number of teams and games played, teams have signed 43% fewer PTOs this season compared to their last major PTO season in 2018-19.
For decades, the professional tryout has been a mainstay of the American Hockey League. When a team needed a body, there wasn’t someone ready and waiting in the wings. The GM scoured the best of the ECHL (or the CHL) and made a signing. Now, the league is stashing at a prodigious rate, and the numbers bear it out. The real question here is why.
One person who has been tending the farm in the AHL through the entire transition is Texas Stars GM and now Dallas Stars Assistant GM Scott White. White started with the Dallas organization when the Iowa Stars were the AHL club. In twenty years, he’s seen the change firsthand.
“More teams have signed more players to regular contracts or use the AHL-ECHL two-way contracts more so than back in the day,” said White told 100 Degree Hockey during a recent Texas home game. “We used to let the players get going in the ECHL and then grab them. The player pool is so small, even with all these leagues. Teams just kind of decided to sign more guys to an AHL deal or AHL-ECHL deal because then you know who you have and the expense is the same as a PTO.”
Would it surprise you that the real reason ultimately comes down to money?
The budgets for the AHL have gone up continuously since 2005. Just think about the Texas Stars in terms of the hockey budget that is readily visible every night. In October 2009 when the team kicked off its inaugural season, it was head coach Glen Gulutzan and assistant coach Paul Jerrard. And that was it.
This past weekend, the Stars had a head coach, two assistants, a goalie coach and a video coach. Director of Player Personnel J.J. McQueen practically lives at the H-E-B Center with how often he is spotted, and Jordie Benn probably has an entire line item in his budget for Bu-cee’s gas and snacks.
“From a business perspective, the game has changed considerably since 2010. That goes, I would say, across the board, for every team, but our team in particular, budgets change.”
The ECHL is definitely also a place where these changes will be obvious.
The ECHL’s VP of Hockey Operations, Dan Petrino, started with the league in 2016 in a role where he was in charge of the league’s central registry, the place where leagues keep track of who is playing where and managing transactions.
“I certainly noticed PTOs going down,” Petrino told 100 Degree Hockey when reached by phone earlier this week. “However, the flip side of that is that the AHL contracted players assigned to our league have increased over that same timeframe and so have the recalls of those players.”
The amount of symmetry between the ECHL and AHL is also another factor that Petrino points out as affecting a change. In 2005, when this data set starts, there were 28 teams in the ECHL. That number dipped as low as 19 in 2010-11 as teams folded. That was, interestingly enough, the modern peak for PTOs at 313.
The ECHL has continued to grow from that low point including a seven team infusion when the Central Hockey League folded in 2014. The ECHL now sports 30. In 2023, ECHL Commissioner Ryan Crelin noted the league’s intention to match the NHL and AHL at 32.
“Having 30 teams, as opposed to 22 or 23, the pool of players is larger. There's more affiliations, obviously, to go around. That also plays a major role in the American League’s need to scout our league.”
It’s interesting to note that White calls out the player pool being smaller and Petrino notes that it’s larger. The difference would seem to lie in the relative viewpoints of the two men. White is looking through the narrow lens of what one team needs, and Petrino sees the entire league. They can both be right. The player pool is getting larger on the whole, but more of those players are already claimed by another AHL team so the player pool of ‘unclaimed’ players ready to jump into AHL action is shrinking year by year.
Another factor that Petrino called out was the length of tryouts. As the man on the trigger of the transaction wire in the ECHL, he has seen firsthand that the length of the average AHL PTO has been increasing over the last six to eight years, which would correlate with fewer PTOs overall.
“The ability to identify the talent in our league has been growing as well,” he added.
“It's taken a long time for our league to develop into really what it has become: a league that has some really good talent. American League teams are starting to devote more time, budget and energy into scouting our league, whether that be from afar or in arena. That has really helped launch players from our league into the American League more frequently and regularly.”
Short-term PTOs are still an occasional occurrence for teams with more strained geographic setups. As an example, if the Syracuse Crunch have an injury on Friday and need a guy for Saturday, they have good reason to call the GM in Reading or Worcester or Adirondack, all drivable distances away, instead of making the short-term call to their actual affiliate in Orlando, Florida.
From the player's side of things, it’s a mixed bag on the balance between AHL-ECHL deals and PTOs. Part of the allure of signing an ECHL-only deal is that you have the potential to get picked up by any team in the league if they need someone. That used to be how it worked in large part. However, with more teams signing more guys to AHL-ECHL deals and having them available as callup options, there are fewer opportunities to break out on an AHL PTO. Thus, more guys sign AHL two-ways to ensure that they’re on the shortlist somewhere and the cycle perpetuates itself.
Altogether there is a constellation of factors leading to the decline in professional tryouts in the AHL. Rising budgets, changing geographies and increasing player talent pool are all pointing to more stability in the league’s rosters and fewer ‘golden lottery ticket’ chances for ECHL players looking for a chance at the next level.
So are AHL tryouts dying out? They’ll never die out completely, but the way that they are used in the modern AHL has been forever changed by forces greater than just one league.
* - Data gathered using TheAHL.com transaction wire data for every season going back to 2005-06, the start of recorded data on the web. Seasons shortened due to COVID were were adjusted for length to standardize on a 72 game season. These data, and the season run rate addition for the current season, are shown in light blue stacked bars on the chart. The yellow line shows the number of PTOs per team, accounting for the number of teams growing since the dataset started.
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