As Hershey prepares to face the Islanders out of Bridgeport to kick off this year's Calder Cup chase, the club finds itself with an opening that is every bit as unusual as it is striking.
Should the Bears win the three-contest set, they won't simply move on — they'll quite literally put a permanent stop to Bridgeport's existence as a team.
The reason: New York's NHL club is shifting its minor-league affiliate north into Ontario's Hamilton, beginning in 2026-27, after a unanimous vote by the league's governing board cleared the change on the final day of March. That franchise will set up shop inside an 18,000-seat Hamilton venue called the TD Coliseum, a building that just absorbed a renovation costing $300 million. The departure brings down the curtain on a 25-year stretch of minor-league hockey in the Connecticut city.
The club issued a statement in which Kelly Cheeseman — whose role spans business operations leadership for the franchise as well as UBS Arena — passed along the organization's deepest gratitude to Bridgeport's city and to the intensely loyal supporters who stood behind the squad for a quarter-century. From the Sound Tigers' earliest days through the current era, he noted, this community had been central to the team's minor-league footprint, and he voiced appreciation for the recollections, the alliances, and the fervor that Connecticut backers had shown toward everyone on the roster and behind the bench.
Chiming in, the franchise's GM and executive VP, Mathieu Darche, said the group was thrilled to install the Ontario city as its principal feeder club. He described the support shown during the changeover as incredible, voiced anticipation about showcasing the organization's brightest young prospects before so devoted a crowd within the world-class, freshly remodeled building, and committed to taking root locally so as to draw in a fresh wave of supporters.
That move restores pro hockey to a place that, between 1996 and 2015, was home to a club known as the Hamilton Bulldogs. Across 19 campaigns, those Bulldogs served as the farm team for two distinct NHL parents — first the Oilers of Edmonton and afterward Montreal's Canadiens. A fresh identity and logo for the squad have yet to be unveiled.
If it happens, this marks the second instance in which Washington's franchise could shut the door on an Islanders chapter.
Back during the spring of 2015, on the 27th of April, it was former Capitals pivot Evgeny Kuznetsov who buried the clinching goal in a seventh game, ousting New York's club from the quarterfinal stage of that year's Stanley Cup chase. The outcome technically "closed up" the 43-year NHL life of the old Nassau Coliseum ahead of the team's shift over to Brooklyn.
Treating the prospect lightly, Alex Ovechkin cracked that it was simply their job and that he would probably go grab a chair.
pic.twitter.com/7JgW6BN8pW — Ian Oland (@ianoland) April 28, 2015
As it turned out, the Islanders eventually found their way back to the venue. After making the 2015 relocation to Brooklyn, the team divided its home dates between Nassau's Coliseum and the Barclays building across the 2018-2020 stretch, closing out a final season at the old barn in 2020-21.
Per a release out of Hershey, this franchise pairing has squared off on 134 occasions in regular-season play ever since the Connecticut side joined the circuit as a 2001-02 expansion outfit. All told, the Bears carry a lifetime mark of 78-37-3-5-11 in that head-to-head history.
When it comes to the postseason, these two have only tangled on two prior occasions. The Bears took the opener — a 2010 best-of-seven set within the East Division semifinals — by a 4-1 count, going on to capture an 11th title. They also got past their rival 3-2 in a best-of-five during a 2019 divisional semifinal.
Of everyone on either current roster, the lone holdover dating to that 2019 meeting is Hershey blue-liner Aaron Ness. The man steering Bridgeport back then was Brent Thompson, who today works as a Bears assistant and happens to be the dad of NHL standout Tage Thompson.
The third and concluding postseason chapter between the two clubs opens Tuesday evening at the Total Mortgage building, where puck drop is set for 7:00 pm. From there the action heads to the Giant Center come Thursday, and if a deciding contest is called for, it returns to Bridgeport's rink on Saturday.