Patrick Williams, TheAHL.com Features Writer
Each July brings one of the biggest days on the AHL calendar: the release of the upcoming season’s schedule.
Teams and their fans can now begin to map out plans for the fall, winter and spring. In that way, the league’s 90th season is not all that different from its debut campaign back in 1936. What is different, however, is the scope. Back then it was an eight-team league with clubs playing a 48-game schedule. Now it’s a 32-team league stretching from Quebec to San Diego, clubs navigating a 72-game slate, and the league as a whole staging 1,152 regular-season games through more than six months of play.
Let’s comb through the schedule.
Canucks to raise their first championship banner
The Abbotsford Canucks will have to wait a bit longer before they hang their first Calder Cup championship banner.
In fact, the first two weekends on the schedule have the Canucks as the visiting team for the home openers of the Henderson Silver Knights (Oct. 10) and the Laval Rocket (Oct. 17).
But that wait will be worth it when that championship banner does go up to the rafters come Friday, Oct. 24. That night the Canucks host the Ontario Reign at Abbotsford Centre. It will be the team’s first home date since Game 5 of the Calder Cup Finals on June 21; two nights later, Abbotsford went into Charlotte and won its first Calder Cup.
After several moves in free agency, some of the faces on the ice come October for the Canucks will be new ones. But the fans who made Abbotsford Centre such a difficult postseason environment for visiting opponents will again be in force.
East meets West
Fans who clamor for out-of-conference matchups will get some of them quickly this season.
Along with the Abbotsford-Laval meeting, both Charlotte (Iowa) and Manitoba (Laval) will also host out-of-conference opponents in their home openers. After starting the season on the road with a pair of games, the Calder Cup finalist Checkers will be back at Bojangles Coliseum on Oct. 17 to welcome the visiting Wild. The Rocket, the AHL’s 2024-25 regular-season champion and Eastern Conference finalist, go to Canada Life Centre to face Manitoba on Oct. 10.
Milestone seasons ahead
In addition to the AHL itself celebrating its 90th season, it will be season number 70 for the Rochester Americans, who entered the AHL in 1956. They start play Oct. 10 when the Toronto Marlies visit. That game will start a home-and-home series between the North Division rivals, who will meet at Coca-Cola Coliseum the following afternoon in Toronto.
For the Grand Rapids Griffins, their 25th AHL home opener is Oct. 17 against Manitoba. Joining them in the quarter-century club are the Chicago Wolves and Bridgeport Islanders. The Tucson Roadrunners will play their 10th season as well.
The league’s senior-most team, the Hershey Bears, open their 88th AHL season Oct. 11 against the Syracuse Crunch.
Returning the favor
The Hartford Wolf Pack and Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins will get to know each other quickly.
On Oct. 11, the Wolf Pack go to Mohegan Arena for Wilkes-Barre/Scranton’s home opener. Six days later at the newly renamed and renovated PeoplesBank Arena, the Wolf Pack get their turn as the home team when they host the Penguins.
Hitting the road
Road trips sometimes can get a bad name, but ask any head coach or player: those journeys can be valuable for a team full of new faces to get to know each other. And putting a team through the test of extended time away from home can be a beneficial experience once the Calder Cup Playoffs arrive.
The Lehigh Valley Phantoms will need to be sharp early. After a pair of home games on opening weekend, the Phantoms will face a stretch of eight of their next nine games on the road into November. Their Atlantic Division counterpart, Hershey, faces a similar obstacle course late in the season. From Feb. 27 through April 15, the Bears will have 14 of 18 games away from home. Included in that run are eight consecutive road games.
January with the Marlies always means packing up for a road trip with the Toronto International Boat Show coming to Coca-Cola Coliseum. This season it will be a more modest six-game swing. But in November, the Marlies have an eight-game journey. For the Providence Bruins, it’s 11 of 13 games out of town, starting Nov. 26.
Out west, Manitoba will go through an early-season period of 11 of 13 games away from home. For a Moose team that could potentially have several new names, there will be plenty of time to spend together on the road. They also play three games in a row at Grand Rapids to start their road schedule in October that will kick off a run of 11 of 13 games on opposition ice.
Speaking of the Moose, the Wolves will make two separate trips to Winnipeg at the end of November. They visit Manitoba on Nov. 20 and 22, make a quick detour for one game at Rockford, and then go back to Winnipeg for games Nov. 29-30. The teams then reconvene in Chicago on Dec. 3 for another match-up.
Elsewhere the Colorado Eagles have a seven-game trip (Feb. 28-Mar. 14) while Iowa plays nine of 10 games on the road (Feb. 19-Mar. 14). A home-heavy first half for the Tucson Roadrunners means making up that difference in the second half. From Feb. 4 through the end of the season, the Roadrunners will play 20 of the 36 contests on their road schedule.
And then there are the Calgary Wranglers and a mammoth 10-game road trip spanning more than three weeks from mid-November into December. The Wranglers will go to Henderson (twice), Bakersfield, San Diego, Coachella Valley, San Jose and Abbotsford (twice) before finishing with a two-game set at Ontario.
