APRIL 1999
by Barry Stagg
AMERICAN HOCKEY LEAGUE: A NEWFOUNDLAND FUTURE?
A recent announcement that the Montreal Canadiens will be moving their farm club out of Fredericton to Quebec City provides plenty of food for thought for Newfoundland hockey fans. With Montreal going back to their pre-expansion arrangement with Quebec City, (remember the Quebec Aces?),there will be only two teams in Atlantic Canada playing in the American Hockey League next year. That will be the St. John's Maple Leafs and the Saint John Flames operating out of New Brunswick. Gone forever are the Halifax Voyageurs, Cape Breton Oilers, Moncton Hawks, and now the Fredericton Canadiens.
What will happen if the Toronto Maple Leafs suddenly decide that the newly vacated Maple Leaf Gardens would make a fine home for the American Hockey League club? All of the contracts and agreements and political understandings that are now in place will not keep the club from moving back to Toronto if management deems it advisable. Perhaps, in a few years, St. John's may find itself with a brand new stadium but with no professional hockey team to generate gate revenue. The same sad story has been repeated elsewhere in Atlantic Canada. Building a new stadium in Halifax, replacing the old Halifax Forum with the Metro Centre did not stop Montreal from moving their farm club out of town. New rinks in Sydney and Fredericton did not keep American Hockey League teams coming to town. With St. John's at the geographic extreme for American Hockey League travel, it is not hard to see that National Hockey League executives could come up with any number of nominally valid reasons for terminating the franchise.
Fans should be on the lookout for news that Leaf executives are in meetings or negotiations with American Hockey League officials. When matters of travel subsidies become topics that Leaf executives like Bill Waters and Ken Dryden suddenly become conversant about then you should watch out for the moving vans down at the back doors of the stadium.
It seems that there is a sour retrenchment going on in all of Canadian professional sports. Baseball in Toronto is edging toward Virginia while the athletically successful Ottawa Senators muse about selling out to rich Americans. The low Canadian dollar should make operating minor league teams quite fiscally attractive to owners but still the exodus continues.
About the only impact that the fans can have in any real way is to continue to support the team at the gate. This at least avoids giving the icy carpetbaggers the most basic excuse to pack up and move back westward across the Cabot Strait.
Until next month be proud - be prosperous.