Capitals Coach Dale Hunter tied to hockey fortunes in two cities

LONDON, Ontario — The game is two hours away, and the seats at J. Dee’s Market Grill are already filling up, a man wearing a London Knights jacket seated one down from another wearing a London Knights cap. There is, already, discussion about playoff tickets — how much they’ll cost, who the potential opponents might be, whether it makes sense to hold off on the first round and wait till the second — because the grind of the postseason for the Ontario Hockey League is only a month away, and these boys, these Knights — well, they’re good again, eh?

Across King Street, in the glistening John Labatt Centre, hang the banners that signify that success — 14 of them representing division or conference championships, more for the retired jerseys of Rick Nash and Corey Perry and some of the best players in the NHL, not to mention the pinnacle, the 2005 Memorial Cup, the championship of Canadian major junior hockey, won right here. They are there because two brothers — two hockey-playing, hockey-living, hockey-breathing brothers — decided a dozen years ago to mortgage their farmland and buy the then-moribund Knights. The task: Revitalize a franchise for 15- to 20-year-old wannabe pros, and in turn revitalize an entire downtown.

Video

The Washington Post's Barry Svrluga talks about Dale Hunter's ties to the London Knights, the Canadian Junior Hockey League team he coached and co-owns with his brother Mark.

Video

The Washington Post's Tarik El-Bashir joins LaVar Arrington, Dan Steinberg and Jonathan Forsythe to debate whether or not the Washington Capitals will make the playoffs.

“It was a little intimidating,” Dale Hunter said.

“We had to make it work,” Mark Hunter said.

It is, to this point, working, and then some — a season ticket base of 7,400, an arena that’s filled to its 9,046 capacity more nights than not, another year atop the standings in the OHL’s West Division. In a way, that success provides a backdrop for the hockey fortunes in two cities, one the capital of the United States, the other this town of some 365,000 in southwestern Ontario.

Dale Hunter coached the Knights for more than 10 seasons and won a higher percentage of his games than any coach in the 38-year history of the league. He now coaches the Washington Capitals, the team for which he played 790 of his 1,407 NHL games, a team that has opened the past three seasons with Stanley Cup aspirations but now, with five weeks to go, is not even ensured a playoff spot. However the NHL season turns out, no other current coach has the option Hunter does: a job in a city he loves for a team he owns that allows him, after practice, to drive 55 miles to his home town of Petrolia, hop onto a combine and harvest the wheat or the soybeans.

“He’s a hockey person,” said Mark Hunter, the Knights’ general manager who stepped behind the bench when Dale headed for Washington. “It’s hockey, farming, horses — that’s his passion. He’s not going to do anything else.”

And with the Labatt Centre filling up on a Friday night, with the first-place team ready to skate out from its locker room through an inflatable castle, it’s easy to understand why success with the Capitals may not be the be-all, end-all for Hunter. For a decade, he put everything — heart and soul and sweat and tears, sure, but money as well — into the Knights. Model franchise in the NHL? Probably the Detroit Red Wings. Model franchise in the OHL? Undoubtedly, the London Knights.