Way, way back in 2004, the Calgary Flames very nearly won the Stanley Cup. One of the reasons they didn’t, perhaps the biggest one, is that they ran out of human beings who knew how to play their system – without an American Hockey League farm team, they used ECHL product Brennan Evans in the conference final because there was nobody else.
Two weeks after the Cup Final loss, then-general manager Darryl Sutter reached a deal with the Carolina Hurricanes to place a few players (and assistant coach Scott Allen) with the Lowell Lock Monsters of the AHL for the 2004-05 season.