Patrick Williams, TheAHL.com Features Writer
A slew of familiar AHL names will be spending the next week in Switzerland.
December on the international hockey calendar means that the Swiss ski resort town of Davos hosts the Spengler Cup. Hockey Canada ices a team at the six-team tournament each year and relies heavily on American Hockey League talent on loan to fill out its roster. In its 97th year, the Spengler Cup is hockey’s oldest international club tournament.
Eleven current AHL players are on Team Canada’s roster including Rockford IceHogs captain Brett Seney, who is one point off the league scoring lead with 30 points (nine goals, 21 assists) in 29 games. Michel Therrien, a head coach for seven seasons with AHL affiliates for the Montreal Canadiens and Pittsburgh Penguins, is in that same role for Canada, and his staff also features assistant coach Drew Bannister, who 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 team of U.S. Collegiate Selects. The tournament, which runs through New Year’s Eve, also features a pair of Swiss clubs in host HC Davos and HC Fribourg-Gottéron, IFK Helsinki (Finland), and HC Sparta Prague (Czechia).
Ontario Reign captain Joe Hicketts will carry over that role and lead Canada. Joining Hicketts in Canada’s leadership group is another AHL captain, Mason Shaw of the Manitoba Moose; Shaw will serve as an alternate captain. Springfield captain Matthew Peca is also donning Canadian red-and-white in Davos.
Canada’s blue line has a particularly deep AHL look to it. Along with Hicketts, Canada’s defense corps has Calen Addison (Utica Comets), Nolan Allan (Rockford), Nikolas Brouillard (San Diego) and Jake Livingstone. Up front along with Peca, Seney and Shaw, the Canadian roster has Graeme Clarke (Hershey), Jean-Luc Foudy (Iowa) and Anthony Richard (Lehigh Valley).
A Spengler Cup invitation means a chance for AHL players to represent their home country internationally. While this is Seney’s second consecutive year going to the tournament, all of the other AHL talent is making its Spengler Cup debut. Canada, a 16-time Spengler Cup champion since making its debut in 1984, last won the tournament in 2019.
On the American Hockey League beat for two decades, TheAHL.com features writer Patrick Williams also currently covers the league for NHL.com and FloSports and is a regular contributor on SiriusXM NHL Network Radio. He was the recipient of the AHL’s James H. Ellery Memorial Award for his outstanding coverage of the league in 2016.
