It’s now official: the Central Hockey League is no more, and the ECHL is taking in all of its remaining teams.
Days before season begins, ECHL adds 7 former Central Hockey League teams
The ECHL is now a 28 team hockey league, and the CHL is no more.
Andrew Weber-USA TODAY Sports
The Allen Americans, Brampton Beast, Missouri Mavericks, Quad City Mallards, Rapid City Rush, Tulsa Oilers and Wichita Thunder have all officially been admitted to the ECHL, leaving the CHL in ruins and growing the ECHL, widely regarded as North American pro hockey's top third-tier league, to 28 total teams.
The teams will join the ECHL as of the 2014-15 season, which begins in just 10 days on October 17. A new schedule from the league is expected this week.
These rumors have been swirling all offseason, and it’s likely just the first step in a massive realignment of minor professional hockey in North America. There’s word that the American Hockey League -- one step below the NHL -- is set to add a division on the Western half of the continent in the near future, which would presumably leave some old AHL mainstay franchises behind in lower-tier leagues and promote some western ECHL-level franchises up a level.
In August, we attempted to reset the entire AHL/ECHL landscape with a hypothetical realignment based on those ECHL-CHL merger rumors, which have now come to fruition, and the expected westward movement of the AHL. To make a long story short, as the dust settles in the coming years, there will be plenty of irritated fans of current AHL franchises, and likely many happy fans of west coast ECHL franchises.
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