OHL offers a different experience than AHL (2024)

The big winners here just might be every minor hockey organization within driving range of FirstOntario Centre.

The new Hamilton Bulldogs will be a big step farther away from the NHL than the old ones were, but they'll be a major step closer to grassroots hockey.

In fact when Dogs owner Michael Andlauer was talking about his new OHL team Thursday afternoon, one of the things he mentioned was that he wants to "help create more local players" for elite-level hockey.

That is the essential equation of the Bulldogs not switching their name but switching leagues. As Spec colleague Scott Radley says, it's local versus level.

Meaning that the overall level of play, and players, in the American Hockey League is much higher than in the Ontario Hockey League, as it should be when you're talking one league of men and the other of boys.

But there are also far more local players who get the chance to play major junior than professional hockey and the pervasive presence of a major junior team, not much older than the local peewees themselves, should provide motivation for even more of them to keep at the game.

Now a local player will be able to get drafted to the elite hometown team without having to go through the Canadiens. Over time, that alone should impact positively on regional minor hockey and junior teams.

For people who actually go to games, "local" means many more rivalries, more often. As of Thursday afternoon, teams in Mississauga, St. Catharines, Guelph, Kitchener and London became the Dogs' automatic enemies on geography alone.

Because the sale was made so late in the hockey calendar, the Dogs likely won't be able to switch conferences in time for next season but Andlauer suggested that the geographically closest teams would likely play against Hamilton more next year than Belleville was slated to.

Still, the Dogs won't have to rely on playing the Marlies a hundred times a year to agitate civic emotion. And OHL fans will travel a moderate distance — which is about how far from Hamilton the bulk of the teams in the league are — to see their team and hold up their end of a rivalry. Andlauer cracked yesterday that he hadn't seen too many buses of fans here from Texas.

Off the ice, there won't much difference in the way the Dogs do business in the new league. They still have to put people in the seats and the principles and challenges of this marketplace remain the same.

But 90 per cent of OHL games are played Thursday through Sundays, scheduling designed partly to aid in the players' educations but also better for school-aged fans.

That's one of the marketing advantages of junior hockey, as are regional rivalries and the prospect of one of the favourites to go first overall in the NHL draft periodically visiting your building, or playing every home game there.

When Connor McDavid is chosen first in the June draft by whichever team wins the NHL loser lottery, it will be the fifth time in the last seven years that the first overall choice will come from the OHL.

But the vast majority of players aren't of that calibre, nor remotely close to it. The AHL delivers a much higher level of hockey, top to bottom of the roster, than the OHL and a large number of junior players never get a sniff at the pros, even a couple of tiers below the Dogs' level.

Your favourite junior player can still be traded, as could your favourite AHL player, but most juniors, even the best ones, remain in town for three years.

The players who stay with the same AHL team for three years are usually the ones who can't make the NHL.

In addition, the team a junior GM builds isn't going to be torn apart by anyone but that GM, whereas the Bulldogs in both the Oilers' and Canadiens' regimes were subject to frequent pillaging by their parent.

What will probably thrill hardcore fans most is the ability to watch a team build for three years around good, young players, assuming the front office is on its toes.

The downside of that is, outside of the London Knights, most junior teams must endure a terrible year or two in the process.

And when juniors graduate to the NHL, they don't join their former teammates as Montreal and Edmonton prospects did; they'll be scattered around the league, making it tougher for fans to follow them.

The AHL Dogs came into a far-worse local market than today's and survived. Thanks to the early foresight of Scott Howson and Andlauer's civic-mindedness, the pro Dogs lasted longer than any Hamilton junior team other than the back-to-back Cubs-Wings franchises.

"We will be successful," Andlauer said, "… because we are successful."

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