Tuesday, Sept. 14, 2004 | 10:24 a.m.
A year after the most dramatic offseason in his three-year tenure as commissioner of the ECHL, Brian McKenna now finds himself in the position of observer.
Tensions have cooled from a 2003 strike that threatened the ECHL season, the inaugural year for the Las Vegas Wranglers. The 28-team league is done expanding, for now, and last year's merger with the West Coast Hockey League went off without a hitch.
So now, McKenna sits and watches as hockey goes through one of the most strained labor situations in recent sports history, with the NHL seemingly steamrolling toward a lockout that threatens the entire 2004-05 season, if not beyond.
And, as McKenna said, "the parties do not appear at all close."
McKenna was in town for the ECHL's preseason Board of Governors meetings last week at the Orleans Arena, and knows that his sport is about to lose a lot of the exposure that it has counted on. But for the short-term, McKenna said, the lockout may have some benefits for a number of ECHL franchises.
"There are a number of markets close to NHL markets," he said. "There's a small possibility of residual effect in a market like Atlanta for the NHL fans who want a fix."
The Gwinnett team in the Atlanta suburb of Duluth is one of 10 ECHL teams that play within an hour's drive of an NHL city, with one team -- Long Beach -- playing in the heart of Southern California, where two NHL franchises could be idled.
In addition to the benefit to the franchises adjacent to NHL markets, McKenna said there will be an impact for cities like Las Vegas, too.
"Some players that would have been in the NHL will be sent to the AHL," he said. "That will force some players in the AHL to our level."
McKenna said that the ECHL is planning on relocating teams to the Sarasota, Fla., and Burlington, Vt., areas in the near future. Stockton, Calif., and Reno are also on the horizon.
This year, the ECHL expanded to Victoria, British Columbia's capital city on an island southeast of Vancouver. The expansion into Canada, coupled with the impending lockout, opens the possibility of Canadian television appearances for ECHL games.
The road trips have become one of the realities of the new, cross-continent ECHL. Each western team makes one eastern road trip every year, and the teams in the East go west once every three years. Teams generally play about three-fourths of their games within their division, which for the Wranglers includes Alaska, Victoria, Idaho, Fresno, Bakersfield, Long Beach and San Diego.
In the first year of that arrangement, Idaho played two teams from the Eastern time zone in the postseason -- first, Gwinnett in the National Conference final, then the (Fort Myers) Florida Everblades in the ECHL championship. The Steelheads went on to win the Kelly Cup championship.
"One of the things that we really didn't anticipate was the way the fans would warm up to the east-west rivalry," McKenna said. "In the conference finals, and the league finals, there was a buzz."
Idaho's playoff run included a five-game series against the Wranglers in the first round, in which Las Vegas went up 2-0 before losing the final three. It capped off an inaugural season for the Wranglers in which they drew an average of 4,981 fans, which was eighth-best in the ECHL but only 400 behind second-best Reading.
McKenna said that he had some concerns about the Wranglers because of Las Vegas' reputation of not supporting minor-league sports and the fact that the team was playing in a casino.
"I thought my first impression would be that you'd go for a hot dog and would be in the casino. Obviously that isn't the case," he said. "They had a solid season, a solid season ticket base with a core base of fans, and we're very encouraged with the overall group numbers. The facility itself is second to none."
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