Wheeling Nailers at WesBanco Arena
Wheeling, West Virginia, is home to one of the premiere teams in the ECHL. The Nailers play at WesBanco Arena, which opened as the Wheeling Civic Center in 1977, and has a current capacity of 5,406 for ice hockey. The Wheeling Nailers are the ECHL affiliate of the Pittsburgh Penguins, and are also affiliated with the American Hockey League's Scranton-Wilkes Barre Penguins. Their head coach and director of hockey operations is Mike Bavis, who had success as a player and as an assistant coach with the Boston University Terriers.
Wheeling Nailers History
The Wheeling Nailers are the longest continuously-running North American minor league hockey franchise to exist outside the AHL, getting their start in 1981 as the Winston-Salem Thunderbirds of the Atlantic Coast Hockey League. The team was renamed the Carolina Thunderbirds after one season, went back to being the Winston-Salem Thunderbirds in 1989 and continued to play in Winston-Salem until 1992, joining the nascent East Coast Hockey League in 1988 after one year in the All-American Hockey League. C.J. Wickham of Steubenville, Ohio, won a contest to rename the team in 1996, after years of conflict between the Wheeling Thunderbirds and the Seattle Thunderbirds of the WHL. The "Nailers" name reflects Wheeling's history as the onetime capital of cut iron nail manufacturing.
Future Stanley Cup–winning coach Peter Laviolette began his coaching career with the Nailers, leading Wheeling to the third round of the playoffs in 1998 before moving on to coach the AHL's Providence Bruins. Legendary hockey coach John Brophy coached the Nailers from 2001 until his retirement in 2003, after which the ECHL's Coach of the Year trophy was renamed in his honor. From 2010 to 2012, the Nailers played select home games in Johnstown, PA's Cambria County War Memorial Arena, the former home of the Johnstown Jets and Chiefs, and where much of the classic movie Slap Shot was filmed. Since moving to Wheeling, the Thunderbirds/Nailers have won two regular-season ECHL titles, in 1993 and 1995, and two conference titles, in 1993 and 2016, in addition to winning two championships in the ACHL, one title in the AAHL, and the first ECHL title, in 1989, while still in North Carolina.
