Plymouth Whalers
Rink: Compuware Arena
Capacity: 4,000
Built: 1996
League: OHL
City: Plymouth, Michigan
Former Home Of: Plymouth Whalers
Games Attended: 7
First Game: January 23, 2009 vs Brampton
Last Game: March 21, 2015 vs Erie
Unique Arena: #22
OHL Arena: #18
The story of the first American franchise in the OHL is a very odd one indeed. The Detroit Compuware Ambassadors began play in 1990 at the old Cobo Hall in downtown Detroit. After two seasons the team moved into the Joe Louis Arena next door and rebranded as the Junior Red Wings, where they captured the 1995 OHL title. However immediately after that title victory the team was evicted from the Joe by NHL Red Wings owner Mike Illitch, and the team split the 1995-96 season between the massive Palace of Auburn Hills and the tiny community Oak Park Ice Arena while a new purpose-built arena was being built for them in the Detroit suburb of Plymouth. The team rebranded themselves as the Whalers after team owner Peter Karmanos’s NHL club, the Hartford Whalers. The resulting arena turned out to be one of the worst in the OHL. From the exterior photo you see above it doesn’t even look much like an arena from the outside, more like a warehouse, and trust me that feeling continued when entering the building.
Upon entering the building, you would walk past the ticket booths and what was actually a fantastic restaurant called CJ’s, that for my money offered some of the best pizza I’ve ever had, period. You would go through a set of doors and enter the rink itself at the top of the bowl. The rink itself really feels like a repurposed warehouse. The concourse, like many newer arenas, goes 360 degrees around the top of the bowl but it is insanely wide on the sides and corners. The story goes that when the rink was being built that there were plans for an upper bowl and that the original rake of the seats was much steeper. So steep in fact that it didn’t meet code and they were told to flatten them out a bit. They then went to the other extreme and the now single bowl of seats had much to shallow of a rake to them. The result is it’s pretty hard to see past the people in front of you. It’s not quite as bad as the Rosemont Horizon in Chicago but it’s pretty bad.
Over the years the Whalers faced the same issues that the CHL teams in the Toronto and Montreal suburbs faced in that the team was poorly promoted in the area and most of the time the Whalers played to small crowds outside of the biggest of games. Another story is that the powerful Illitch family even got media outlets to suppress stories on the Whalers and hence far fewer people even knew they existed. Or like in Toronto or Montreal many just didn’t care. The team never had a videoboard at centre ice that hung from a low ceiling. There were projectors in the concourse, but these video feeds were just projected onto a blank brick wall, not to mention the areas they were projected onto were near impossible to see from most of the seats. After many years of losing money, both with the Whalers and himself personally, Karmanos sold the Whalers, and they left for the greener pastures of Flint in 2015. I was able to attend the final Whalers game in Plymouth and was happy to see a packed house for the finale (though having Connor McDavid on the visiting roster may have helped that).
Despite all the negative things I said about the arena itself I do actually miss going to games in Plymouth. The fans (in my experiences) were mostly friendly, and I met some friends among the Whalers faithful. So, one more time….
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLERRRRRSSSSS
GOALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL
