Photo courtesy of Rob Ferguson Photography. All rights reserved.

“The farmer has to be an optimist or he wouldn’t still be a farmer.”
- Will Rogers

The Oklahoma City Barons earned four out of a possible six points this weekend in a three games in three days home stand with the playoffs in full and glorious view. The Barons, for the second straight season, will make the playoffs. They’ll also look to make some history as an Oilers farm team, and quite possibly in a shortened season.

The 2002-2003 Hamilton Bulldogs are the only Oilers affiliated farm team to have nabbed over 100 standings points in the regular season. That team did have the advantage of being dual affiliated with the Habs, and thus featured the talents of some players you may have heard of – Michael Ryder, Tomas Plekanec, Marc Andre Bergeron, Marcel Hossa, Fernando Pisani, Mike Komisarek, Francois Beauchemin, Raffi Torres, and Mike Ribeiro to name a few. That squad eventually would lose in the Finals of the AHL Playoffs but they were a dominate team from beginning to end. Continue reading →

Photo courtesy of Stu Seeger. All rights reserved.

Announced yesterday, the San Antonio Rampage will play host to a preseason game between the Florida Panthers and the Dallas Stars. The game will be played Friday night, September 28th at the AT&T Center in San Antonio. It will be the third time an NHL preseason game has been played in San Antonio, but the first played in the ten year old AT&T Center. Tickets will only be $15.

From the release:

“This is a great opportunity to showcase the NHL talent from our affiliate the Florida Panthers and from Texas’ NHL team, the Dallas Stars,” said Spurs Sports and Entertainment President Rick Pych. “Spurs Sports and Entertainment is dedicated to providing the highest caliber sports and entertainment to the San Antonio community and this NHL game will feature some of the best hockey players in the world. For years the Rampage have been developing talented players right here in San Antonio that have gone on to achieve great success in the NHL. This game will exhibit exactly what the Rampage and the American Hockey League is all about, which is seeing the same players who you once saw in San Antonio and other AHL cities now playing at the highest level on teams like the Panthers and Stars.”

This is fantastic on the part of both the AHL and NHL as well as the two affiliates. Pitting a Texas team against the Rampage affiliate is a double-whammy of excitement for fans. It’s also an interesting wrinkle to the on-going discussion of how AHL and NHL counterparts can work together to promote the game well beyond the boundaries of any particular city.
Continue reading →

Nightly the playoff seeds change. Nightly I get a little precocious in my hopes that the Barons get a good matchup in the first round of the Calder Cup playoffs. Ironically, last season it was the Barons that were clinging to a final playoff spot during the month of March. With the uneven divisions, the Barons narrowly made the postseason, and played as admirably as any 8th/9th seeded team could have hoped to do. But the tables have turned. The Barons are on top and dreaming of whom that 8th seeded team just might be.

Today we look at the Lake Erie Monsters. Affiliated with the Colorado Avalanche they are (pun intended) eerily similar to their parent club. They don’t have dominate scoring on any forward line, but can unleash chunks of offensive erratically. They play a defensive style of hockey as a result, and can muck it up with the best of them. Continue reading →

Arguably the most interesting playoff series of the Western first round would be Abbotsford vs. Oklahoma City in a five game grudge match. Simply put, these teams matchup well at times, but the firepower of the Barons offense is too much to swallow for Heat goaltenders. But even more than the player-by-player matchup is the Heat-Flames and Barons-Oilers affiliations that have deemed this rivalry the “Baby Battle of Alberta”. Although it’s not been a stout competition nor anything resembling a persnikity rivalry, the games are fun to watch. Owning a 9-3-0-0 record against Abbotsford over the last two seasons, there is reason to believe that the Barons might soar through a first rounder with the Heat. Even more cretankerous for the Heat is their inability to dismantle the Barons in Abbotsford. So much so that the Heat haven’t beaten the Barons in Western Canada in six attempts. That’s painful. Continue reading →