A different time, a much-different league

St. John’s entry into the AHL, became official 30 years ago today

Today marks the 30th anniversary of a press conference at old Memorial Stadium in St. John’s to officially announce the Toronto Maple Leafs would be moving their American franchise to St. John’s.

That May 8, 1991 event wasn’t really one of revelation — word of the plans for what would become the

St. John’s Maple Leafs had emerged about a week before — but the media gathering, emceed by then-city manager Frank Power and headlined by Toronto assistant general manger Floyd Smith and Mayor Shannie Duff, was the first tangible evidence of what would eventually give St. John’s an almost decade-anda-half run as a pro hockey city.

It must be noted that perhaps the most lasting remembrance from the 1991 press conference was when Duff declined putting on a Maple Leafs jersey so as to avoid a jinx; a year earlier, she had donned the Minnesota North Stars colours at an announcement the North Stars would be placing an AHL club in St. John’s, only to have those plans fall through.

Whether the mayor’s caution had anything to do with it, the agreement with the Leafs held, leading to what became one of the better stories in the history of minor hockey franchises.

Bringing up today’s anniversary is the sort of thing that can have hockey fans here pining for those AHL days. Perhaps it is just the nostalgic tendency to toss aside the chaff of the past and concentrate only on the positive recollections, but such yearning is understandable.

In those days, the American Hockey League had reason to ballyhoo itself as the secondbest hockey league in the world — there was no KHL, and other domestic European leagues hadn’t yet done any full-fledged recruitment of pros from North America — and the fact there were none of the veteran limits that now determine AHL rosters, meant more experienced players were available for game-day lineups. It also allowed teams more leeway in retaining fan favourites. These days, it would be difficult for the likes of defencemen Nathan Dempsey, eight years an AHL Leaf, or Guy Lehoux, who played seven seasons in St. John’s, to have had that kind of tenure.

That’s not to say the AHL doesn’t still offer high quality, but the league is now made of a much-different fabric than what AHL Leafs fans, or even those of the St. John’s Icecaps — the AHL’ s second incarnation in the city — became accustomed to seeing at Memorial Stadium, and later, at Mile One Centre.

It also looks different on a map.

The AHL has proven to be a transient circuit. Of the cities that were part of the league when St. John’s entered in 10991, just three remain in the AHL — Rochester, Hershey and Springfield, with the latter having had a number if franchise changes over the years.

In fact, since 1991 and the birth of the AHL Leafs, there have been 29 other North American cities that have had AHL teams that no longer have them to day.

That number could rise to 30 after the announcement of the latest AHL shuffle earlier this week, with the New Jersey Devils, who had their farm club in Binghamton, N.Y., revealing they will move to Utica, N.Y., next season, replacing the Vancouver Canucks, who are relocating their AHL operations to Abbotsford, B.C.

In recent years, the main reason for what has been a chronic pattern of relocation has been the desire for NHL teams to keep their top prospects close at hand (Vancouver being the most recent example).

In a way, St. John’s can be seen as one of the early victims of the trends. In 2005, the Maple Leafs moved their AHL team to Toronto and what was then called the Ricoh Coliseum (today, Coca Cola has the naming rights). And St. John’s would twice suffer a similar fate with Icecaps partners, as first the Winnipeg Jets, and then the Montreal Canadiens, took their minor-league franchises to Manitoba and Laval.

For a myriad of reasons, NHL organizations find it necessary keep their farm teams close at hand. Mind you, the contention in those corner has always been that the Leafs’ pulling up stakes in St. John’s 2005 had more to do with business than hockey

operations. Ricoh Coliseum (constructed on the CNE grounds exactly a hundred years ago) had undergone a major refurbishment, partly with public money, and had become a burr in the butt of Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment; it vied with the MLSE’S privately constructed Air Canada Centre (now Scotiabank Centre) for concerts, trade shows and other events. However, the Coliseum was without a tenant after the failure of the AHL’S Toronto Roadrunners (remember them?). Seeing an opportunity, the Leafs offered to put their AHL team at the Coliseum and in doing so, got a lease agreement that saw them take over management of the building, thereby turning a competitor into an asset,.

Hockey fans in St. John’s had been done in by downtown Toronto machinations.

But I digress, distracted by an ancient peeve. What’s more, the truth is the St. John’s Maple Leafs would have eventually been done in by something else.

These days, NHL teams sincerely feel the need to keep tabs on their minor-league players and to have them nearer to the parent team’s hockey-development, medical, nutritional training and sports psychology resources. The close proximity also allows recalls to happen expeditiously (at least when teams are at home). But more than anything, an adjacent (or near-adjacent) farm team is a huge aid in salary-cap management.

Even though it applies to NHL payrolls, nothing has changed the AHL more than the salary cap. For one thing, it has become more important than ever for teams to

develop cheap young players to fill the bottom part of big-league rosters in order to be able to sign stars to the big deals, and as stated before, teams are convinced the immediacy of those young players is a boon to that development.

There is also the matter of day-to-day accounting. Having the farm team close to the parent’s neighbourhood, means, for example, that one or two waiver-exempt players from an NHL’S team’s roster can be sent to the minors on off-days, then recalled when needed. While in the minors, their pay (as long as it is below the million dollar-annually range) does not apply for salary cap calculations.

Yes, this is a sort of a nickel-and-dime process, but still can produce dollars in savings that can either aid in salary-cap management and/ or produce a cushion that will contribute to a team being able to acquire a player with a large contract at the trade deadline.

How much have NHL teams bought into this practice?

Well, 24 of the 31 current National Hockey League organizations — or more than three quarters — have parent/ farm team geographic orientations that meet one of the following criteria:

• Located in the same city

• Located in the same province or state (in most cases, within the same metropolitan area)

• Located within 330 kilometres of each other (about the distance between St. John’s and Gander)

It’s interesting to note all three AHL teams which opted out of the 2020-21 pandemicaffected season — Charlotte (affiliated with Florida),

Milwaukee (Nashville) and Springfield (St. Louis) — fall into these groups.

This is the atmosphere of the AHL these days, and it’s a atmosphere in which a city like St. John’s couldn’t survive.

In reality, it is a credit to the Newfoundland capital that — between the Leafs and Icecaps — it was able to maintain its AHL status for two decades before the Canadiens moved their minorleague operations to Laval, Que., in 2017.

And if it’s any solace, folks in and around St. John’s who hanker for the sort of hockey that arrived on our doorstep three decades ago can be assured there are plenty of others around North America who might be sharing the feeling, and that for the most part, what they are wanting doesn’t really exist anymore.