Edmonton Ice

Ed Chynoweth believed that Edmonton was ready for another junior hockey franchise in the mid-1990s. The city had been without a Western Hockey League (WHL) franchise since a return of the Edmonton Oil Kings in 1978-79 turned out to be a dismal failure. After that lone unsuccessful season, people believed that a WHL team could not co-exist with the Oilers.

Chynoweth thought the opposite and believed that the Oilers were on the wane.  In 1996, the Oilers were in a protracted drought that saw the team miss the playoffs since the 1992-93 season.  Chynoweth believed that fans were hungry for a new, affordable hockey product.

Chenoweth pointed to the the Calgary Hitmen for his reasoning.  The Hitmen had debuted in 1995-96 at the Saddledome and played to encouraging home crowds, despite having the NHL Flames to compete with.

On September 21, 1996, the Ice played their first home game to a sold-out crowd at the Northlands Agricom, which Chynoweth believed was small and intimate enough to generate a lively atmosphere. The Ice started well in a new Battle of Alberta by beating the Hitmen the previous night in Calgary. The team made it a sweep in its home opener, beating the Calgarians by a 6-4 score.

Despite the 2-0-0 start, the Ice experienced the growing pains of any expansion team and finished the season with just 14 wins and a last-place finish in the WHL’s Central Division.

Even though crowds jammed the Agricom to see the opener, the numbers dwindled soon after.  At the time, the Oilers were financially unstable, and a group of concerned business people launched a Save the Oilers ticket drive to quash a rumoured move to Houston. The resulting fan support likely pulled money away from the Ice, and the team announced it was 400 season tickets short of its projected goal to start the next season.

"I think, from our standpoint, that we were hurt a little bit by the Save the Oilers drive," said Chynoweth in 1996. "It’s hard to be on a level playing field when you’re surrounded by people whose season-ticket interest has been stirred by the threat of an NHL team being moved."

As well, the Oilers were emerging as a young, exciting squad, making the playoffs in 1997—rekindling the excitement for NHL hockey in the city. The Ice’s second season in Edmonton, in 1997-98, drew poorer crowds, and the team collected only 17 wins in 72 games. At the conclusion of the campaign, Chynoweth pulled the plug on his Edmonton dreams and moved the team to Cranbrook, British Columbia, where he called the team the Kootenay Ice.

The player to watch on the roster of that very first Ice team was Dimitry Yakushin, a Ukrainian defenceman who had visited Alberta as part of his nation’s elite Druzhba ’78 squad. Yakushin had stayed in Canada to play Tier II hockey and impressed the scouts enough that the Toronto Maple Leafs drafted him prior to his season in Edmonton.

Yakushin became only one of five Ice alumni who would go on to crack an NHL lineup—Jay Henderson, Steve McCarthy, Ryan McGill and Jaroslav Obsut were the others. Despite Yakushin’s promise, neither he nor the other four Ice alumni ever made an impact in the NHL.

After the team relocated to Cranbrook in 1998, the wins began to pile up as the talent level on the team dramatically increased. In 1999-2000, the Ice took the Western Hockey League title. The next season, the Ice’s lineup included Mike Comrie, who left the University of Michigan to join the WHL. Although Comrie left the Ice midway through the season to join the Edmonton Oilers, the team finished the year winning 45 of 72 games. In 2002, Kootenay won both the WHL and Memorial Cup championships. Jarret Stoll, another Oiler draft pick, would score the winning goal to give the Ice the Memorial Cup

Stoll and Comrie became proof that even though the Ice had left Edmonton, a little bit of the team would return to the city in which it was born.

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