Scott Wedgewood survived much of his lone year in the ECHL without any backup in net and without any backup for his catching hand.
It was 2012. The minor league team he played for in Trenton, N.J., wasn’t carrying a second-string goaltender on the roster. Wedgewood, now a breakout star for the Avs, was on his own and navigating an equipment shortage.
“I used my own glove, my one glove, for like half the season. That was a painful hand for a bit,” he said Tuesday in the Avalanche locker room. “Everyone has their story, right? And then you get up here, and I’ve got six gloves in my stall right now.”
For the few in Colorado’s building who’ve passed through the ECHL on their way to a first-place NHL team, experiences like that color the sympathy and disappointment felt as a players strike looms in the developmental professional league.
“I hadn’t really (followed the negotiations) until I heard about it yesterday, and then I saw they are on strike. So they have some things to work out. It’s disappointing,” said Avalanche coach Jared Bednar, who has strong roots in the ECHL. “I was almost part of one of those, my early years in the Coast, and it’s always a difficult situation. But hopefully they can iron something out here quick over the holiday break and get back to playing hockey.”
The Professional Hockey Players’ Association announced Monday that its ECHL membership served a strike notice set to go into effect Friday, when the league is scheduled to resume play after a holiday break. Contract talks for a new collective bargaining agreement began in January.
Bednar’s playing career included stints with two ECHL teams, the Huntington Blizzard and South Carolina Stingrays. He went on to coach the Stingrays to a Kelly Cup league championship in 2009, jump-starting a career behind the bench that has now landed him the distinction of being the NHL’s second-longest-tenured active head coach. He and his wife still have an offseason home in South Carolina that has become the family’s base.
The ECHL, formerly known as the East Coast Hockey League and now known only by the acronym, serves as a farm system to the NHL and AHL. It’s been a springboard for hundreds of careers that have reached the NHL. Sixty former ECHL players were on NHL opening day rosters this season.
“The tough part is obviously, you have both sides, right? Owners want to make money. Players want to make money,” Wedgewood said. “Everyone wants fair treatment. … Obviously, I hope they can figure it out. … You’ve got guys down there who want to make it, want to level up, want to do all that stuff and to get what they need to do it. And then also, (for the) owners, you’ve gotta put a product on the ice. You’ve gotta pay more than just the players. You’ve gotta pay staff and travel and all that stuff. So I know there’s probably some room to be made on both sides, and where they get that from, I don’t know. I can’t really speak on it.”
The PHPA announced an update on Tuesday that indicated the two sides are not any closer to reaching an agreement. Executive director Brian Ramsay said in a statement that the PHPA sent a written request to the league to resume talks Monday evening that went unanswered, followed by an offer Tuesday “to avoid missing any games and use a mediation or arbitration process to find a settlement.” According to Ramsay’s statement, the ECHL rejected the offer and demanded “significant movement and concessions from the players.”
The ECHL has published details from its most recent proposal online, including an immediate 16.4% increase to the salary cap for this season and future cap increases to pay players “nearly 27%” more than the current cap dictates.
Most of Wedgewood’s old friends and connections around the league “have shut it down and gone into the working world,” he says. When he played in it more than a decade ago, he felt like the league did a good job providing housing for the players. But he also understands the “tough living situation” many players attempt to overcome for enough time to catch a break and move up in the hockey world. Their term of endearment for players drafted directly into the NHL who didn’t go through that kind of experience, according to Wedgewood, is “‘silver spoons,’ if I’m not mistaken.”
While he stressed that he isn’t aware of the minutiae of the current impasse, he said he hopes for a solution soon above all, as did Bednar.
“You get down there, and you’re trying to put your best foot forward and play,” the Avs goalie said. “I remember we would play three (games) in four nights, overnight travel, sleep in buses, things like that. … I think the guys that have gone through it, leveled up, got to this standing now, you appreciate your career path.”