Silver Nuggets: Should the Senators get a new AHL affiliate?

He’s from Toronto. His ignorance of the popularity of the 67s can be forgiven.

The 67s might be great and fun or whatever, but as far as benefit to the Ottawa Senators, not the city of Ottawa, an AHL team is far more valuable.

I can’t really think of any benefit to the Sens that the 67s provide. Yeah they have Prince now, but an Ottawa AHL team would have only Ottawa players.

St. John’s is closer to Sierra Leone than to Vancouver.

They never were. Vancouver and Winnipeg (Manitoba Moose) were affiliated until last season, when the Jets returned. At that point, Vancouver took over the Chicago Wolves, and the Jets put their affiliate in St. John’s.

the St Johns IceCaps are the affiliate for the Winnipeg Jets, because True North owns both teams. So Vancouver came to an agreement with the Atlanta Thrashers old affiliate in Chicago.

A better analogy would be the South-west teams. the Los Angeles Kings are affiliated with the Monarchs from Manchester, New Hampshire. The Phoenix Coyotres affiliate is the Portland Pirates in Maine, while the San Jose Sharks have the Worcester Sharks in Massachusetts meanwhile, the AHL’s Syacruse Crunch from Upstate New York are the affiliate for the Anaheim Ducks. .

Call-ups: If it’s an overnight flight with a stop-over or two, call-ups take a lot longer. If you’re in the midst of a back-to-back homestand and a player’s injured, good luck bringing your prospects over from St. John’s and having them capable of playing a game the next day.

Money: That added travel adds plenty of extra cost. Might not be much for a professional sports team, but it sure adds up.

Time: If it takes hours and hours to get to the NHL team, that player’s not going to be playing anywhere near his abilities had he proper rest.

Now, this isn’t as relevant to Ottawa as Vancouver, because we’re in Central Canada, not the West coast. Still, it’s a concern.

They were up for CBC’s Hockey Town award a couple years back, and just built a brand new arena downtown in the last couple of years. It is in close enough proximity to Ottawa for player travel, and certainly can’t but help pick up some Sens fans in the battle of Ontario.

Two concerns – Not sure what it is like now, but the Frontenac’s lost money for a number of years at the old Memorial Centre, so I don’t know how much community support there is for the OHL club, nor how much that would garner for an AHL club.

The second is who retains the rights to the AHL club. Presumably, an existing franchise would have to relocate, because I don’t think the Sens can say tell the AHL that their players are creating a club that will play out of Kingston, so just deal with it. Therefore there would need to be an ownership group looking to make a go of it in Kingston.
If another club relocates to Kingston, it isn’t likely to be the Binghamton club, because the Bingo folks LOVE their team and support it regardless. – So where does that club come from. I don’t know enough about the league to be able to answer this.

Definately think that Gatineau/Ottawa won’t work for AHL just from an interest/revenue perspective there are too many other choices and gov’t types are fickle when Ottawa teams don’t win. Face it, Silver Seven Sens on its own isn’t going to sell out games for an AHL club – no matter how strong we are.

Waterloo makes no sense for any reason that I can come close to thinking of. But I bet in PEI they’d love to have their Sens back…

So with three teams, the city’s hockey-watching dollar is already pretty stretched.

Doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be awesome, though.

As I stated above, they certainly worked really hard to gain ‘hockey town’ status on CBC’s competition – despite coming up a bit short. I know fan interest was dwindling in Kingston when they were playing out of the old Memorial Centre, but now that they have the KRock Centre downtown, I think attendance has picked up quite a bit. The population of the city is rapidly growing. They might be able to handle an AHL franchise, they might not. But it would be worth looking into.

Neither Kingston nor Kitchener has the market to support a junior team and an AHL team, so if you want to stick the B-Sens there, you’re effectively saying that your plan is to kill off the Fronts or Rangers.

I very much doubt this would happen. In more likelihood, the incoming AHL team would fail to get a proper foothold because the OHL teams are so heavily entrenched.

As for ill will, if the people living in those towns choose to spend their money going to AHL games instead of OHL ones, I doubt they’d really be too upset. They’d be putting their money where their mouths are.

Sens or Fronts!

It was at the draft, he was prodded to comment about it and reluctantly just came out with “that’s a really big contract.”

Sure, it’s not the liveliest of towns, but players would be living in Canada and pretty close to Ottawa—significantly closer than Binghamton is. I wonder if the lower costs and potential synergy would make it possible for the team to play there, even if the attendance isn’t great.

I also wonder if many Ottawans would go down for the day to see a game. People from Orleans likely take almost 90 minutes to get to SBP; for me to drive from Barrhaven to Cornwall, I’m looking at just over an hour. I’d probably go once in a blue moon. Especially if the or Corn-Sens organized shuttle bus-ticket deals.

I wonder what’s on CKOI that’s pre-empting the Sens tomorrow night.

Ah I didn’t know that, so it has to be swaps with another team?

Markham would be alright, too.