A slew of well-known AHL names will spend the next week in Switzerland.
December on the international hockey calendar means that the Swiss ski resort of Davos will host the Spengler Cup. Hockey Canada fields a team in the six-team tournament each year and relies heavily on loaned talent from the American Hockey League to fill out the roster. The Spengler Cup has been around for 97 years and is hockey’s oldest international club tournament.
Eleven current AHL players are on the Team Canada roster, including the Rockford IceHogs captain Brett Seneywho is one point off the league lead with 30 points (nine goals, 21 assists) in 29 games. Michel Therrienhead coach for seven seasons at AHL affiliates for the Montreal Canadiens and Pittsburgh Penguins, fills the same role for Canada, and his staff also includes assistant coach Drew Bannisterwho spent parts of six seasons in AHL coaching roles for the St. Louis Blues; Bannister took the Springfield Thunderbirds to the 2022 Calder Cup Finals.
Seney and Canada opened play Friday with a 3-2 win over a US Collegiate Selects team. The tournament, which runs until New Year’s Eve, also includes a pair of Swiss clubs: hosts HC Davos and HC Fribourg-Gottéron, IFK Helsinki (Finland) and HC Sparta Prague (Czech Republic).
Ontario Government Captain Joe Hicketts will take over that role and lead Canada. Hicketts is joined to the Canadian leadership group by another AHL captain, Mason Shaw of the Manitoba elk; Shaw will serve as alternate captain. Springfield Captain Matthew Peca also wears Canadian red and white in Davos.
Canada’s blue line has a particularly deep AHL look. Along with Hicketts, the Canadian Defense Force has done just that Calen Addison (Utica comets), Nolan Allan (Rockford), Nikolas Mist (San Diego) and Jake Livingstone. At the front, together with Peca, Seney and Shaw, is the Canadian selection Graeme Clarke (Hershey), Could it be? (Iowa) and Anthony Richard (Lehigh Valley).
An invitation to the Spengler Cup represents an opportunity for AHL players to represent their home country internationally. While this is Seney’s second year in a row going to the tournament, all the other AHL talent is making their Spengler Cup debuts. Canada, a 16-time Spengler Cup champion since its debut in 1984, last won the tournament in 2019.
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