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No one should be surprised at how quickly the Wheeling Nailers were able to find a new NHL affiliate.
It was less than a month between the Pittsburgh Penguins announcing it was ending its 29-year partnership with the Nailers and the Columbus Blue Jackets announcing earlier this week that they and the AHL Cleveland Monsters would become the new affiliates for the longstanding ECHL franchise in Wheeling.
Location was a big selling point for everyone involved. Sure, the Penguins were less than an hour away from the Nailers, but the AHL Wilkes-Barre team was five and a half hours away. With this new partnership, the Blue Jackets are about two hours from Wheeling and the Monsters are only two and a half hours away.
"Everybody looks at the affiliate as Pittsburgh and Columbus. What we were looking for in an affiliate was the distance between the AHL, meaning Wilkes-Barre/Scranton and Cleveland," said Nailers President and Governor Brian Komorowski. "This will save a great amount of time if Cleveland needs a player on a Saturday night and they find that out after a morning skate. A player can very easily be in Cleveland that night. That would've been nearly impossible with Wilkes-Barre."
But another big plus for the Nailers is a fact listed in our story on the announcement: the Nailers lead all ECHL franchises with 71 former players and coaches who have advanced to the NHL. That's not just with the Penguins, but with all the NHL franchises the Nailers have affiliated with during its existence.
Translation: if you work with Wheeling, you have a franchise that knows how to prepare both players and coaches for the next level. And, in the end, that's what a farm system is all about.
And that's why, after the Penguins announced their break with the Nailers, there should have been no worry that another NHL franchise would soon step in. And there was no doubt that, as soon as they could, Nailers officials were beating the pavement looking for a new partner.
As we've said before in this space, that's the beauty of strong local ownership, which the Nailers have. The Nailers are owned by the Hockey Club of the Ohio Valley LLC., an entity managed by the Regional Economic Development Partnership, which sits only a few blocks up Main Street from the team's home in WesBanco Arena.
Economic development is the name of RED's game -- literally, it's right in the organization's name. Those folks know what the Nailers mean to Wheeling, and what Wheeling means to the Nailers. Their mission from the beginning has been to put the team in the best possible position to succeed in the Friendly City. Once again, they succeeded.
The affiliation with Cleveland and Columbus puts the Nailers in as good of a spot as could be found in the circumstances. The travel to both the Blue Jackets and Monsters can be done in a car trip. It helps the Nailers expand their fan base into Ohio and helps the Blue Jackets expand their fan base east into eastern Ohio and West Virginia, which have traditionally been more Penguin-friendly. And it gives the Nailers a continued and definitive link to an NHL franchise, one around which they can market and promote.
While it wasn't fun to see the Nailers and Penguins end a 29-year partnership, Nailers officials have done will in establishing a new one with the Blue Jackets and Monsters. Hopefully, it will be one that can flourish for many years to come.