The Red Light District

JACKSONVILLE, Fla – I’m going to miss the curse. What curse, you might ask? Why, it is the curse of the Brabham Cup, a curse so terrible and despicable that it made Scobby Doo and his friends with the Mystery Machine run away in fear. OK, that might be laying it on a bit thick but the curse was fun….unless you were the victim. For those of you who might not be familiar with it, the Brabham Cup is the trophy that goes to the regular season champion of the ECHL. Unlike the playoff championship, which was originally awarded with the Riley Cup and now the Kelly Cup, the Brabham Cup has been around the ECHL since day one. The Cup is named for the honorable Henry Brabham, one of the founders of the ECHL and one of the original owners of the Erie Panthers.

Brabham is also one of the original members of the ECHL Hall of Fame. The curse is very simple. In the first seventeen years of the ECHL, only one time did the same team win the regular season title and the playoff champion. That team was the 1996-97 South Carolina Stingrays. They won the Kelly Cup the first year it was competed for, having replaced the Riley Cup the year before. There was even a period in the early 90’s where the Brabham Cup champion lost in the very first round. It happened three times in four years. Now, things have changed. The Alaska Aces won the Brabham in 2006 and won the Kelly and the Cincinnati Cyclones did the same thing this past season. So, after only one successful postseason in seventeen years, we now have two in three. Yes, the curse is over. I, for one, will miss it. However, I’m sure the players won’t. Other Ramblings……. Ok, we are, supposedly, going to have three so-called single A leagues starting up this fall/winter in the northern half of the country. The MAHL, the EPHL and MWHL. Seriously, just how many of these three leagues will actually drop the puck come October/November? I haven’t mentioned the AHL in previous columns so I will just mention them with this comment………seriously…..the Iowa Chops. Seriously? Last column, I spoke about scheduling difficulties. Well, I also like scheduling gimmicks. Each league has a little something in it that would be fun to watch. When the WCHL teams joined the ECHL, I looked forward to the day there would be a regular season meeting between Alaska and Florida. The league apparently thought the idea was good because the league has, in the past, matched these two teams in the regular season. Now, while it is not up there, and they have played four times during the regular season, why can’t the AHL schedule Milwaukee and Norfolk to play more times than they have during the regular season. Since Milwaukeejoined the AHL in 2001, the two teams have met four times in the regular season (with Milwaukee 1-2-1 against Norfolk). That’s an average of only one meeting every two years. I realize that there are expenses involved in travel these days but wouldn’t it be fun if the Admirals played the Admirals more. You don’t get two teams in the same league with the same nickname all that often (the only other recent example I can remember is Ottawa and Saskatchewan sharing the Roughrider name in the CFL, although the two teams spelled it differently), so, in my opinion, it would offer nice marketing possibilities if Admirals play each other. My thanks to Andruw Bourgeois for providing the Milwaukee/Norfolk stats. More ramblings later…. Contact the author at Kenneth.Holdren@prohockeynews.com