November 22, 1994 saw the IHL follow through on its expansion as it announced expansion in the west by awarding Dave Pasant, the former president and chief executive officer of the Jackson National Life Insurance Company, an IHL franchise for the cool sum of $6 million. The new IHL franchise would be the 18th team in the International Hockey League, and the new Bay Area team would join the South Division that included the Las Vegas Thunder, the Utah Grizzlies, the Phoenix Roadrunners, and the Los Angeles Ice Dogs.
The team moved quickly as they needed a name to begin selling the hockey idea to Bay Area residents. In December, the team had chosen to go with "Spiders" as its name, dismissing other suggestions such as "Seals", "Quakes", "Fog" and "Rush". According to Bruce Gate of The Examiner, this choice of name was due to one man - David Pasant.
"I've had a strange fascination with spiders since I was a little kid," said David Pasant, the 44-year-old owner of the Spiders. "They're scary."
Pasant also saw the tie-in for merchandising with the name, stating, "There's no question that a major revenue source is merchandising of your logo and all the spinoff products. Clearly, the Spiders look to merchandising the same way the Sharks did. It's also great because when people are wearing your jerseys or your hats, they're walking billboards."
With the team having a name, Pasant went to work in building the hockey side of the equation as he hired former Montreal Canadiens head coach and former Quebec Nordiques head coach Jean Perron as the Spiders' new general manager and head coach on January 11, 1995. Perron's experiences in winning the Stanley Cup with Montreal in 1986 seemed to point to him being an ideal candidate for the jobs despite having being an TV analyst for the game for five years before San Francisco came calling.
Perron began to put pieces in place by hiring Bruce Boudreau to be his assistant general manager and an assistant coach while pulling former Canadiens defenceman and 39 year-old Rod Langway out of retirement to be a player player-coach with the team. Langway had retired in 1993 after knee and shoulder injuries slowed the two-time Norris Trophy winner, but Langway accepted the position as his transition to retired life simply wasn't his cup of tea.
"It's really difficult being a player, getting out of the game and becoming a normal citizen," Langway admitted to Gate.
The team began selling tickets on June 21, 1995 as they secured the Cow Palace in San Jose as their home rink. The ticket prices ranged from $10 or less at the lowest price to $25 at the upper end of the costs. The Spiders announced that half of the 11,000 available tickets for each game would be in that $10-or-lower range, making Spiders hockey an affordable venture for families! Would the low prices pay off once the season started?
When training camp opened on September 8, 1995, Perron had recruited 11 players from the Montreal Canadiens and Quebec Nordiques including Langway and defenceman Normand Rochefort to join the four players the team announced on June 7 as their first players - Dave Maley, Dave Pasin, Alain Cote, and Mario Doyon. He also found himself with a pile of San Jose Sharks on his roster as players like Robin Bawa, Dale Craigwell, and Ed Courtenay all suited up for the Spiders. He also found himself a bit of a puck-stopping gem in goaltender Stephane Beauregard.
"The Spiders want to bring affordable professional sports back to the fans. We are inviting the public to come to our preseason game for free and see first hand what a great product we are putting together," team president Richard Rogers told SFGate. I get that low ticket prices discusssed above might be a good incentive to come and see hockey while the team recoups some costs, but offering free admission and parking? It seems that Dave Pasant was giving away the goods a little too easily.
Thanks to a contract dispute with the Sharks, Sandis Ozolinsh signed on with the Spiders for two games to begin the 1995-96 season, and he holds the distinction as being the first Spider to score a goal in the IHL as he did so in the team's first regular season game on September 29, 1995 as the Los Angeles Ice Dogs defeated the Spiders by a 5-1 score that night. His two-game IHL stint with the Spiders was the second time he had played in the IHL after a 34-game run with the Kansas City Blades in 1991-92.
Just three games into the season, Bruce Boudreau was fired by Jean Perron in one of the most bizarre sequences of events I've ever heard. According to a report in La Presse, Boudreau was fired because Perron "was afraid of" Boudreau and "felt threatened". But there has to be more to this story, right? Well, Dan Steinberg of the DC Sports Bog went down that rabbit hole with the following paragraphs:
Needless to say, Boudreau's stint with the Spiders lasted only three games in which the club was 0-1-2. I'm quite certain that Boudreau's career hasn't been derailed by this dismissal, so all's well that ends well, I guess.
Perron's choices for who he had on his roster were also eyebrow-raising at times. On October 4, 1995, the Spiders announced they had signed former San Jose Sharks enforcer Link Gaetz to a 25-game deal. Despite the article incorrectly identifying Perron as "Jean Fallon", the terms of the contract that Perron and Gaetz negotiated did get out eventually. Gaetz had agreed to a deal that saw him paid $500 per week with mandatory Alcoholics Anonymous meetings attendance as one of the conditions for his contract. After three games that saw Gaetz rack up 37 PIMs, he was cut loose by Perron.
Weird moments in personnel aside, there were some bigger moments on the ice. The Spiders recorded their first-ever win on October 11, 1995 in a 4-1 home win over the visiting Orlando Solar Bears. Greg Bullock scored the team's first game-winning goal in the third period of that contest. They'd follow that game up with another first as they won their first-ever road game by a 4-1 score over the defending Turner Cup champion Utah Grizzlies which, coincidentally, marked their first win streak as well! They would put together a four-game win streak that was eventually stopped on October 26, 1995 by the Chicago Wolves, leaving San Francisco with a 6-5-1 record.
In a rather surprising piece of reporting, sixteen-year-old Slovakian hockey phenom Robert Dome, who would be drafted by the Pittsburgh Penguins 17th-overall in the 1997 NHL Entry Draft, scored a pair of goals for the Utah Grizzlies against the Spiders on October 28, 1995. Before we go on any further, imagine being a sixteen year-old playing professional hockey in a league that rivaled the AHL and against men who are literally twice your age or older. I don't know how this was allowed back then, but Dome became "the youngest player ever to sign a pro contract in a North American hockey league" when he signed a two-year deal on October 18, 1995. That's absolutely wild!
Back to the Spiders, the Peoria Rivermen were the first team to shut out the Spiders in their history when they scored a 3-0 win over San Francisco on November 15, 1995 as Jon Casey stopped all 23 shots from the Spiders. It took them a few months to pitch a blank scoresheet themselves, but the Spiders finally did it on April 11, 1996 when they recorded a 3-0 win over the Utah Grizzlies at home thanks to Stephane Beauregard stopping all 31 shots.
The losses, though, were piling up and the fans were far more enthralled with the NHL's Sharks than the IHL's Spiders as attendance began to fall. On any given night, rows of seats went unfilled as the Spiders battled their way through the IHL regular season. Perron's squad, led by John Purves' scoring ability, remained in the hunt for a playoff spot, though, and they would make it into the Turner Cup Playoffs on April 6, 1996 thanks to a Peoria loss that helped the Spiders make the promised land in their first season!
With a playoff spot guaranteed, it was a question of where would the Spiders finish, and who would they play in the opening round? With a victory in their final game, the Spiders would clinch home-ice advantage in that series as the fourth-seeded team in the Western Conference where they would meet the fifth-seeded Chicago Wolves. I can tell you that the Spiders lost that game to Las Vegas, but still held onto third-place in the South Division with a 40-32-10 record and the fourth seed in the West as they opened their first-ever playoff series against the Wolves.
The playoff action would have been great for the city had anyone noticed. Cracks were starting to form in the foundation that held the Spiders together as it was reported by Ray Ratto in SFGate that Dave Pasant had put the Spiders up for sale after losses climbed past the $7 million mark. It wasn't hard to see that the Spiders may be struggling financially with rows of seats available for as low as $5 per chair, but the future looked grim in terms of the Spiders surviving a second season after averaging just 4555 fans through 24 home games into January.
The Wolves and Spiders split the opening two games of their series in San Francisco before the series shifted back to Chicago. April 19 saw the Spiders win their first-ever playoff game by a 4-2 score over the Wolves before the Wolves regrouped and downed San Francisco by a 4-1 score. The April 24 game saw the Wolves push the Spiders to the brink of elimination in the best-of-five series with a 3-1 victory, so the Spiders needed to rally for a big road win if they hoped to send this series to a fifth and final game.
As they were preparing for the game, though, the news only got worse for the future of the Spiders. After meeting with the city in an effort to keep the Spiders in the Bay Area, a report by Tony Cooper of the San Francisco Chronicle was published that suggested that the Spiders would fold following the playoffs. Pasant didn't go as far as confirming the report, but he made it clear to Cooper that there were considerable changes coming for the franchise which including moving the team to somewhere other than the Bay Area. Clearly, this was a distraction the team didn't need while preparing for their biggest game yet.
The Spiders and their MVP suited up for Game Four on April 28, and they scored early to lead 1-0 thanks to Dale Craigwell. However, Chicago would find the equalizer in the third period to make it 1-1, and we'd need overtime to solve this one. Unfortunately for the Spiders, Chicago's Kevin Pozzo scored in the extra time to give the Wolves the 2-1 victory, eliminating the Spiders from the postseason.
While things still weren't looking good for the team's future in the Bay Area, it got a lot darker on May 17, 1996 when the San Francisco Spiders filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In the story filed by Larry Stone of The Examiner, it appeared that "Pasant had an agreement in principle to sell the Spiders to Harvey Nathan, a Charleston, S.C., delicatessen owner who planned to move the team to Tacoma", but the deal fell through. Pasant was still talking about moving the team there, but other destinations that had been mentioned included Sacramento, Saskatoon, and Atlanta, but options for those places never materialized.
By June 24, 1996, the team had ceased operations altogether as Pasant simply wasn't willing lose any additional money. The IHL suspended the team's membership in the hopes that it may be transferred somewhere, but there simply wasn't a city or owner who wanted to assume the losses that the Spiders had shown in the Bay Area nor risk moving it somewhere only to have the franchise lose money in a new location. The team was almost transferred to downtown Victoria, BC in 1997 to begin play in 1999-2000, but the new, state-of-the-art facility planned for Victoria never materialized. As a result, the Spiders were disbanded for good, and the IHL itself would fold in 2001-02 after years of financial losses on the league's side. The AHL would absorb a handful of IHL teams into its league, and the rest were folded.
For one season of hockey in 1995-96, the arachnids invaded the IHL and the Bay Area with their unique brand of hockey. There were highs, there were lows, there were cheers, and there were tears, but the San Francisco Spiders certainly had wrote an interesting chapter into hocey history. Could they have been a strong franchise with fan support? That's debatable considering the challenges that the IHL faced as a whole, but one thing is for certain: the Spiders certainly spun an interesting tale.
Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!
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