Three AHL affiliates made coaching additions this week, and the common thread is experience.
Ontario Reign, the Los Angeles Kings’ farm team, brought in Mike Haviland as an assistant coach on Tuesday. Haviland is 58 and comes in with more than 20 years behind the bench at just about every rung of the pro game. He spent the last two seasons as an assistant with the Columbus Blue Jackets after working as an associate coach with the club’s AHL affiliate, the Cleveland Monsters, from 2022-24.
Haviland’s background stretches well beyond that stop in Columbus. The Middletown, New Jersey native won a Stanley Cup as an assistant with the Chicago Blackhawks in 2010 and was part of Chicago’s NHL staff from 2008-12. He has also served as an AHL head coach three different times, with Norfolk, Rockford and Hershey, and earlier in his career built his reputation in the ECHL by winning back-to-back Kelly Cups in 2003 and 2005.
In Henderson, the Silver Knights added Alex Loh as an assistant on first-year head coach Joel Ward’s staff. Loh, 41, took a less traditional route into the job because he never played professional hockey. Instead, he worked his way up from a video-coach role with the AHL’s Portland Pirates.
He has been in the Golden Knights organization since 2022, first as an assistant and later interim head coach with the ECHL’s Savannah Ghost Pirates. Over the past two seasons, he coached the ECHL’s Tahoe Knight Monsters and went 76-55-13 with two playoff berths. Loh joins holdovers Jamie Heward and goaltending coach Fred Brathwaite in Henderson.
Coachella Valley also made a hire, adding Scott Ford to Derek Laxdal’s staff. Ford, 46, is another former Blue Jackets assistant making the jump, after recent seasons on Columbus’s NHL bench.
Before coaching, Ford played 11 seasons as a defenseman. Most of that career came with the Milwaukee Admirals, where he wore the captain’s letter and became the club’s AHL-era games-played leader. He moved into coaching with Milwaukee in 2015, later worked with the Chicago Wolves, and helped the Admirals win three division titles and reach back-to-back Western Conference Finals.
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