ECHL's 37th season opens on Friday

The 37th season of the ECHL begins on Friday with eight games, continues on Saturday with 11 games and concludes with four games on Sunday.

The ECHL welcomes two expansion teams for the 2024-25 season, giving the League 29 teams in 22 states and one Canadian province. The Bloomington Bison host their first game on Saturday against Toledo while the Tahoe Knight Monsters open their inaugural season on Thursday, Oct. 24 against Jacksonville.
 
Friday’s schedule features a pair of rematches from the 2024 Kelly Cup Playoffs with Norfolk hosting Adirondack and Greenville welcoming Orlando. Other games on Friday’s schedule include Trois-Rivières entertaining Maine, Wheeling visiting Maine, Savannah hosting Indy, Iowa welcoming Fort Wayne, Utah visiting Idaho and Wichita hosting Kansas City.
 
In addition to Bloomington, seven other teams open their home schedule on Saturday with Worcester taking on Reading, Atlanta hosting Indy, Jacksonville entertaining Florida, South Carolina welcoming Orlando, Kalamazoo taking on Cincinnati, Kansas City hosting Wichita and Tulsa welcoming Rapid City.
 
Began in 1988-89 with five teams in four states, the ECHL has grown into a coast-to-coast league that has 29 teams in 22 states and one Canadian province playing 1,044 games from Oct. 18, 2024 to April 13, 2025. The ECHL is the third-longest tenured professional hockey league behind only the National Hockey League and the American Hockey League, and last season welcomed an average of 4,944 fans per game, marking the League’s highest per-game average in 26 years. Additionally, between the regular season and Kelly Cup Playoffs, an all-time record of 5,358,907 fans attended ECHL games.
 
The ECHL has affiliations with 29 teams in the National Hockey League in 2024-25, marking the 28th consecutive season that the league had affiliations with at least 20 teams in the NHL.
 
New faces behind the benches
 
Nine of the 29 ECHL teams will have a new coach in charge as the 2024-25 season gets underway.
 
B.J. Adams takes over the as the new head coach in Allen, bringing previous head-coaching experience with Erie in the Ontario Hockey League.
 
Phillip Barski, who was an assistant coach with Greenville from 2020-22, is the first head coach of the Bloomington Bison.
 
In Greenville, Kyle Mountain takes over for 2023-24 ECHL Coach of the Year Andrew Lord, who has moved on to Halifax of the Quebec Maritimes Junior Hockey League. It is the first head-coaching assignment for Mountain after serving as the Swamp Rabbits’ assistant coach last season.
 
Another assistant coach assuming the head-coaching role for the first time is Brandon Mashinter in Jacksonville, who succeeds Nick Luukko, who is now an assistant coach for Wilkes-Barre/Scranton of the American Hockey League.
 
Reading’s Jason Binkley enters his first full season as the club’s head coach after serving as the interim head coach during the second half last season. Binkley went 13-16-4 in his 33 games in the interim capacity.
 
Former ECHL player and assistant coach Jared Staal is the new head coach in Savannah after spending the last two seasons as an assistant coach with Charlotte of the AHL.
 
South Carolina’s new head coach is Jared Nightingale, who joins the Stingrays after two seasons as an AHL assistant coach with Rockford, and also has coaching experience in the United States Hockey League and Ontario Hockey League.
 
The first head coach in Tahoe is Alex Loh, who has won over 100 games as an ECHL head coach in three-plus seasons with Adirondack and Savannah.
 
Bob Deraney takes over as head coach in Worcester after serving as part of the team’s coaching staff since the 2019-20 season. Previously, he was head coach of the Providence College women’s hockey team from 1999-2018 and head coach of Worcester State College men’s team from 2021-23.
 
Approaching milestones
 
Justin Taylor of Fort Wayne begins the season third all-time with 816 games played. He enters the season 43 games shy of passing Sam Ftorek for second place on the ECHL’s all-time games played list and 68 behind all-time leader Mike Pelech. Taylor sits ninth all-time with 279 goals and is 21st with 544 points.
 
Idaho’s Matt Register is 14th on the ECHL’s all-time games played with 611 while he ranks eighth all-time with 380 assists. With 11 assists, Register would move into fourth-place on the career list. Register needs 10 points to become just the 33rd player in ECHL history to reach the 500-point plateau.
 
On the coaching front, Florida’s Brad Ralph, who is the league’s all-time leader with 95 career postseason wins, enters the season fifth all-time with 486 regular-season wins. Ralph is six wins shy of moving into fourth place and is 33 wins away from moving into third all-time.
 
Tulsa’s Rob Murray enters the season tied for fourth all-time with 926 games coached and seventh with 451 wins. Murray is 30 victories away from moving into sixth on the league’s all-time wins list.