Bittersweet title
But team hoped to cap 50th anniversary in style
The AHL cancels remaining games to end the season, leaving the Milwaukee Admirals as champions.
It was a bittersweet Monday for the Milwaukee Admirals.
The American Hockey League announced that its board of governors voted to cancel the remaining games due to the coronavirus pandemic, ending a promising season for Milwaukee.
The silver lining is that the Admirals are the AHL champions. The standings – sorted by points percentage – and statistics as of March 12 are considered official. Milwaukee had the league's best record at 41-14-5-3, good for 91 points and a .714 points percentage.
The Providence Bruins finished second at 38-18-3, a .661 points percentage.
"It's just too bad," Admirals owner/ chief executive officer Harris Turer said. "We would have liked to, as an organization, have had the opportunity to challenge for the Calder Cup.
"We had a team that could have won. It would have been a lot of fun to give ourselves the opportunity to win that Cup. The last time we made it to the finals was the first year I owned the team back in 2005-06 and that was a special run."
With the Admirals celebrating their 50th anniversary, this season looked like it would also be special. The team ripped off a 13-game winning streak from November 2 -December 1 that propelled it to the top of the standings for good.
The Admirals had an eye-popping goal differential, allowing the fewest goals in the league (141) while also scoring the second most (211).
"Especially this year, with the 50th anniversary, it just seemed like a perfect storm," Admirals head coach Karl Taylor said. "Everything was coming together.
"The team was playing great. The environment and everything was going the right way and then some external
circumstances took over."
The Admirals' last time on the ice was a 6-1 thrashing of the San Antonio Rampage on March 11 in front of a raucous crowd of 9,278 fans at UW-Milwaukee Panther Arena. Milwaukee needed just one more victory to clinch a playoff spot.
But that evening, the Utah Jazz's Rudy Gobert tested positive for coronavirus and the NBA shut down. The rest of the sports world followed, with the AHL suspending the season March 12.
Four days later, the Admirals sent their players home and they scattered across the world, hoping to make it back if the season started again.
But Turer was always pessimistic that AHL games would resume.
"This is an issue of revenues," he said. "The NBA, Major League Baseball are talking about coming back, but nobody is talking about playing in front of fans.
"Since our league doesn't have any finances in terms of resources coming in from television, I think it eventually became pretty obvious we weren't going to be able to start back up again."
The Admirals didn't get to hoist the Calder Cup, but they can still call themselves AHL champions.
"I'm very proud of everything we accomplished this year because it's really hard to do," Taylor said. "It's the first time in my career that I've been in this position (to win AHL) and hopefully not the last.
"You definitely have to enjoy what you did. I don't think there's any bitterness. This is what it is. So if people want to say that they were going to catch us or they would have beat us in the playoffs, all these things that people are going to speculate, that's fine, That's the joy of sports."