New England Hockey Apparel

Twenty-three defunct minor league teams from Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, plus the Cape Cod Coliseum, all on shirts, hoodies, hats, and jerseys you will not find anywhere else.

New England was playing professional hockey before most of the country had an indoor rink. Providence and New Haven were charter cities of the minor pro game in the 1920s, Boston fed the Bruins from its own farm clubs for decades, and the region kept producing teams through the AHL era of the 1990s and 2000s. Every one of them is gone now. This is where they live on.

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New England hockey history

Rhode Island. The Providence Reds are the region's anchor. They began play in 1926 in the Canadian-American Hockey League, were a charter member of the American Hockey League in 1936, and won four Calder Cups before the franchise left for Binghamton in 1977, having spent its final season as the Rhode Island Reds. Fifty-one years in one city is a run almost no minor league team has matched. The Rhode Island Eagles carried the state's pro hockey banner in the 1970s.

Connecticut. New Haven had pro hockey from the 1920s on, and the Eastern Hockey League's New Haven Blades filled the old New Haven Arena for most of the 1950s and 1960s. The Nighthawks took over when the New Haven Coliseum opened in 1972 and gave the city twenty years of AHL hockey as a farm club for several NHL teams. The Beast of New Haven brought the AHL back briefly in the late 1990s. In 1993 the Coliseum also hosted Roller Hockey International's Connecticut Coasters for a single summer. The Danbury Trashers of the United Hockey League lasted only two seasons in the mid-2000s but became the most famous minor league team in the state, run by a teenage general manager and the subject of a Netflix documentary.

Massachusetts. Boston's minor league story runs alongside the Bruins. The Boston Tigers, later renamed the Cubs, played in the Can-Am league in the late 1920s and 1930s, and the Boston Olympics were the Bruins' own farm club through the 1940s. On Cape Cod, the Coliseum in South Yarmouth opened in 1972 and hosted a rotating cast of teams over the next decade: the Cubs, the Codders, the Freedoms, and the Buccaneers. The AHL returned to the state in the 1990s with the Worcester IceCats and the Lowell Lock Monsters, both of which have since given way to other franchises.

Maine. The Maine Nordiques of the North American Hockey League played in Lewiston in the mid-1970s as a farm team of the WHA's Quebec Nordiques. Lewiston came back into the pro and junior picture with the QMJHL's MAINEiacs, who won the league championship in 2007, the first American team to do so. In Portland, the Pirates arrived in 1993, won the Calder Cup in their first season, and played more than two decades before leaving. The same ownership group put the New England Stingers of Roller Hockey International on the Portland floor in the summer of 1994; the team lasted one season.

New Hampshire. The New Hampshire Freedoms were the state's entry in the late-1970s Northeastern Hockey League, and they remain the only New Hampshire team in our catalog.

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