Quote:
Originally Posted by Hackey
Anyone know why the Flames farm team moves so much? Seems like it happens all rhe time.
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They were in Saint John, NB for a decade. Over that time, all the other AHL teams in the Atlantic Provinces moved away and the Maritimes went from being an AHL market to a QMJHL market, so it was no longer economically viable.
Then, they tried a couple of seasons with a shared affiliate with Carolina. It saved the team money prior to and during the lockout season, and the Flames didn't have a lot of top-calibre prospects at the time, so a shared affiliation made sense at the time.
After the lockout, the set up in Omaha. I believe the problem with Omaha was that the local group they partnered with made a bunch of big promises they were unable to follow through on and the team was losing too much money there.
After Omaha, they went to the Quad Cities. QC had a good and successful lower-level team, the Mallards, that folded up when the Flames came to town, which didn't go over well with the local fans. I believe that ticket prices also went up quite a bit from what people were used to paying for the Mallards. They probably could have made QC work, but Abbotsford came calling and promised to cover any losses the team accrued, so it was an offer that was hard to refuse.
As long as the City of Abbotsford was covering the Heat's losses, it was a sweetheart deal for the Flames. They lasted 5 seasons there, but ultimately, the City wanted out of the deal and there are too many Nucks fans in the market that were unwilling to accept the Flames' farm team being in their backyard, so attendance was never good. Without the City covering the losses, the travel would have been too much, and the Heat's schedule meant they didn't get as much practice time as you want for an AHL team.
This California move has been in the works for a couple of years now, so I'm sure the Flames would have preferred to stay just one more year in Abbotsford, but when that became a non-starter, they had to find somewhere to play this season.
Adirondack lost the Flyers' affiliate this year, and the Glens Falls Civic Center was on the auction block and facing demolition without a permanent tenant. Putting the farm team there temporarily bought both the Flames and Glens Falls some time to get things worked out.
Glens Falls is in the heart of ECHL territory and is a smaller market that should do well in the ECHL.
This could actually be one of the smaller cheques the Flames would mail this year.
If I were Treliving, I would sue whoever responsible for the mix-up. That is huge insult as far as I am concern. 
