For a good long time our farm team was the Manitoba Moose. They were owned and operated by True North Sports and Entertainment. Soon, True North purchased the Atlanta Thrashers franchise and turned them into the modern incarnation of the Jets, and then made the Moose their new farm team, moved them to St. John's and made them the Icecaps. So the Canucks were without a farm team, so they signed an affiliation agreement with the Chicago Wolves.

While they were our affiliate, we had some problems with the Wolves playing some of their career AHLers over our prospects - most notably when Eddie Lack was injured they iced Matt Climie as their starter in lieu of our prospect Ericsson - and Canucks management wasn't happy with that.

At the time the Blues owned an AHL franchise of their own in Peoria (The Rivermen) and they were faltering - probably something to do with something like 3 AHL teams in northern Illinois, not to mention the Blackhawks. So St. Louis wanted to get rid of their franchise and they sold it to the Canucks. The Wolves then signed an affiliation agreement with St Louis, and we moved the Rivermen to Utica, NY (a market more likely to generate revenue) and rebranded them as the Comets.

Now the big question is whether we want to keep them in New York. As it sits Utica is actually a great place for keeping travel down within the AHL as it's pretty central to most all of the teams there, but it does suck because it's on the opposite coast from Vancouver, so callups become a bit more problematic travel-wise. There's a lot of talk within the AHL to try and move more teams out west to help out western teams in that respect, but so far nobody's biting. So we just signed a two-year deal to keep the Comets out east for now.