OKC Barons Gone – What’s Next

Today the Oklahoma City Barons announced that they will be ceasing operations at the end of the 2014-2015 season. The Edmonton Oilers AHL affiliate has never been able to sustain a large fan base and with the crazy distances traveled in the AHL’s weirdly aligned Western Conference it must be a difficult task keeping an organization like this financially credible.

If the Oilers aren’t renewing their affiliation agreement and the AHL is seemingly dropping down to 29 teams is it possible that he Oilers are once again going to find themselves in the past, without a team to send their top prospects too? Days of yore when the Oilers partnered with Montreal and the Hamilton Bulldogs so they had somewhere to send their guys?

Those days were tough times for Oilers prospects, and as is often talked about, developing prospects in this fashion can be tough if not damned impossible. The Montreal Canadiens, the parent team of the Bulldogs always made sure that their prospects were higher in the depth chart. The Oilers farm hands found themselves playing less significant minutes if at all. Look at goaltending prospect Jeff Drouin-Deslauriers for the prime example of just how bad something like this can turn out. You have to hope that the Oilers have learned lessons from this past and won’t put them in a positions to repeat history here.

But What Now?

There have been plenty of rumors surrounding the NHL’s development leagues in the last 12 months (here and here), with the impending collapse of the CHL and the rumored plan to absorb some of those CHL teams into the ECHL. Add to that the NHL’s western conference teams want to have their affiliates geographically closer to their parent clubs and I believe that we’ll see the Oilers owned Bakersfield Condors joining the AHL next season. The Condors are a popular team in California and it appears they’d be able to support and AHL team attendance wise. Add to that the fact the Daryl Katz bought the Condors at an ECHL price and now may be able to move that team up a league for pennies on the dollar.

So if this is the case, what do the Oilers do about an ECHL affiliate? Well there are a few options here; option 1 would be to purchase another team in the ECHL, or one of the teams that will be amalgamating into the ECHL. Option 2 would be to do nothing, well not actually nothing. The Oilers don’t need to own a team to have an affiliate, there will be teams looking and getting themselves an agreement in place shouldn’t be that hard to do.

Like I mentioned above, lets just hope the the Oil think they can go about things status quo, lessons from the past should be to big of an alarm bell for the Oilers to sit and do nothing.

The Other loss we will see from the collapse of the OKC Barons is the fact that we’re lucky to have some great people down there following and reporting on the team, I only hope that the likes of Neil Livingston, Patricia Teter, and Eric Rodgers find themselves still reporting on the Edmonton Oilers AHL franchise, just this time from sunny California.

Thanks for Reading