By Bill Turianski on the 10th of June 2022; twitter.com/billsportsmaps.
Links…
-chl.ca.
-ontariohockeyleague.com.
-theqmjhl.ca. lhjmq.qc.ca (Fr).
-whl.ca.
-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Memorial_Cup.
Canadian Hockey League (CHL): the umbrella-organization for the 3 leagues of Major Junior Hockey in Canada. The 3 leagues are: the Western Hockey League (WHL, est. 1966), the Ontario Hockey League (OHL, est. 1933), and the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League (QMJHL/ LMJHQ in French, est. 1969). 60 teams: in the CHL-system, there are 52 teams from Canada (from 9 Canadian provinces), and there are 8 teams from the USA (from 4 US states). The CHL as the umbrella-organization was established in 1975, but as mentioned, the three individual leagues were established earlier; see league side-bars on the upper-part of the map for more info.
CHL teams are for players aged 16-20. Two non-North-American-born players are allowed per team; overage, and underage player-waivers are sometimes allowed. Players receive stipend & board, and believe it or not, this actually qualifies as pay in the NCAA’s monopolistic view, so players who commit to an OHL or QMJHL or WHL team in the CHL-system become ineligible to play later on in the USA in the NCAA-system. Whereas around 30% of NHL players have had a US-collegiate career prior to signing in the NHL, a solid 47-to-48% of all NHL players originally played in Canadian Major Junior hockey {see this, from the Washington Post}.
The winners of the 3 leagues each season contest the Memorial Cup Tournament (est. 1919), which is usually played in the month of May. The Memorial Cup is a 4-team round-robin competition, which comprises the WHL champion, the OHL champion, the QMJHL champion, plus the host team. The past two tournaments were cancelled due to COVID, so this is the first tournament since 2018-19, when the Quebec league’s Rouyn-Noranda Huskies were Memorial Cup champions. Rouyn-Noranda is a small and isolated mining community of 42,000, 320 miles NW of Montreal. The Rouyn-Noranda Huskies beat the Halifax Mooseheads 4-2, in Halifax on May the 26th 2019, to win the title.
This year’s tournament [2022] will take place in St. John, New Brunswick from June 20-29, at the 6.3-K-capacity TD Station. The St. John Sea Dogs of the QMJHL are the host team. The St. John Sea Dogs won the Memorial Cup in 2011; this will be the team’s 4th appearance in the tournament.
•so, the St. John Sea Dogs are already in the tournament as host team. The other 3 teams to qualify are down to the following…
•WHL: Edmonton Oil Kings or Seattle Thunderbirds.
•OHL: Windsor Spitfires or Hamilton Bulldogs.
•QMJHL: Shawinigan (Quebec) Cataractes or Charlottetown (Prince Edward Island) Islanders.
Scores…CHL.ca.
…
…
The map is a location-map with the three league’s areas tinted.
The chart on the far-left-hand-side:
Memorial Cup Tournament Appearances & Titles by current CHL teams (2021)
-Number of Memorial Cup titles (including host-team status noted by italics).
-Number of Memorial Cup tournament appearances (including host-team status noted by italics).
26 of the 60 current CHL teams have won a Memorial Cup title. The most titles won by a current team is the 5 titles won by the Oshawa Generals (who last won it in 2015). The most tournament appearances is 16 appearances, by the oldest Major Junior hockey team, the Regina St. Pats (est. 1917). Note: in the chart, teams are listed, not franchises, thus Kootenay Ice’s one Memorial Cup title and 3 tournament-appearances do not carry over, when the franchise moved from British Columbia, to Winnipeg Manitoba, as the Winnipeg Ice, in 2019. So that makes it 7 for 7 in Canada: now all 7 Canadian cities with NHL teams (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa, Winnipeg) also have a Major Junior hockey team. And with the debut of the NHL’s Seattle Kraken this season, Seattle is also in this category.
Other changes in teams and their gear since 2019 are the following…
-Cape Breton Screaming Eagles, in 2019, dropped the Screaming from their name and unveiled a smart new logo {Cape Breton Eagles}.
-Portland Winterhawks unveiled a new logo in 2021, dropping their long-time Chicago Blackhawks-derived logo, for one that features a hawk’s head superimposed over a grey mountain range with subtle ‘WH’ inscribed in the mountain’s crags {Portland Winterhawks}.
-Sarnia Sting dropped the disc logo and went back to classic full-wasp-with-hockey-stick design {sportslogos.net/[Sarnia Sting]}.
-Erie Otters went back to their original otter-with-helmet-&-stick logo, in just yellow-gold and navy (no red) {sportslogos.net/[Erie Otters].
-Everett Silvertips’s primary logo is now the green-silver-and-pale-brown shield-with-grizzley-head-&-mountain design {Everett Silvertips}, and their original primary logo (grizzley-with-stick-wordmark) is now their shoulder-patch logo.
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Thanks to all at the following…
-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Memorial_Cup.
-Canadian Hockey League (en.wikipedia.org).
-Photo of Memorial Cup (CHL), unattributed at hhof.com.
-Hockey ice photo from dreamstime.com.
