Today the AHL granted Austin (really Cedar Park) a limited membership in the league. There’s a condition to purchase a team in a year.
I’m confused. There will be a team but inevitably another one must be bought and relocated to Texas. So who will exactly be wearing the jerseys, etc? Maybe the two lawyers I used to play D&D with can cut through the BS and Orwellian language.
The AHL’s official site wasn’t much clearer. It did provide other details such as the (formerly) Philadelphia Phantoms and Quad City Flames being given permission to move: the former to upstate New York and the latter to British Columbia. Now with the Flames leaving for Canada, I think this would put them in the Northern Division with the other Canadian teams and create an opening in the Western Division for Austin. I knew they wouldn’t allow a team from the East come here because it would put nine teams in the WD (Chicago, Rockford, Iowa, Milwaukee, Quad Cities, Houston, San Antonio and Peoria in addition to Austin).
We probably won’t know more until the Calder Cup is awarded. I think the purchase of an existing team would be better than starting from scratch, even if it had the top prospects for Dallas in it.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/spt/hockey/minors/stories/042909dnspohockeyaustin.3efae69.html
The Stars are attempting to buy the dormant Edmonton Roadrunners franchise and reactivate it, however the Oilers are already planning to reactivate it and use it for the 2009-2010 campaign. So the AHL awarded Austin a one-year-only exemption to join the league. This appears to mean that the AHL will grow by TWO teams this year – Austin and Edmonton (plus a couple of relocations) – and then shrink by one team for 2010-2011.
Correction: the Road Runners won’t be activated until 2010-2011, so they’ll stay dormant for this year. The league will expand by one team in 2009-2010 with the provisional addition of Austin, then another in 2010-2011 with the RR reactivation, but then contract by one when the Austin team acquires some other AHL team.