Eastern Professional Hockey League (1959–1963)

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The Eastern Professional Hockey League ( EPHL for short ) was a professional ice hockey minor league that operated between 1959 and 1963 mainly in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Québec .

For the 2008/09 season a league of the same name was founded, which only existed for one year and was then dissolved. The only EPHL winners were the Jersey Rockhoppers .

history

The National Hockey League began early on to cooperate with teams in the lower-tier professional leagues such as the AHL or the WHL , but these leagues with the so-called farm teams were never under the direct control of the NHL. For this reason, the Eastern Professional Hockey League was founded in 1959, the first farm league to be organized entirely by the NHL. If the league fulfilled its purpose of offering young NHL talents an opportunity to play below the highest professional league, the project ultimately failed due to the fact that it was very difficult to get professional in the mainly smaller cities from which the EPHL franchises came To settle ice hockey, so that the league had shrunk to four teams in 1963 and the project had to be ended.

Teams

In its last season, the EPHL was played in an interlocking game operation with the International Hockey League . After the end of the Eastern Professional Hockey League, the NHL founded the second Central Hockey League , in which mainly farm teams from larger cities in the American Midwest played. So the franchise moved from Kingston to Minneapolis , where it was now active in the CHL under the name Minneapolis Bruins .

Tom Foley Memorial Trophy

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