Hamilton Kilty B’s
Rink: Dave Andreychuk Mountain Arena
Capacity: 2,500
Built: 1966
League: GOHL
City: Hamilton, Ontario
Home Of: Hamilton Kilty B’s
Games Attended: 1
Only Game: February 21, 2026 vs St. Catharines
Unique Arena: #120
GOHL Arena: #7
For the last century the blue-collar steel city of Hamilton, Ontario (Canada’s answer to Pittsburgh, PA) has had three arenas which at some time or another were the largest indoor hockey rinks in the city. First you had the old Hamilton Forum down on Barton Street, which actually hosted the NHL during the 1920’s as well as a pair of Memorial Cup Champion teams in the Red Wings and Fincups. In the modern day you have the now-named TD Coliseum downtown which is a large coliseum designed for Hamilton’s never-coming glorious NHL return, as well as top level concerts. It was also home to the OHL and AHL levels of hockey. Then you have the Mountain Arena.
The Mountain Arena was never meant to be Hamilton’s top level indoor spectator facility; it just accidentally happened that way…twice! In the summer of 1976, the OHL’s (then OMJHL) Hamilton Fincups were riding high, having just won their league championship and the Memorial Cup that spring. Their home arena, Hamilton Forum, however, was in rough shape and had been for years. Before training camp opened, the ice plant failed and it was deemed too expensive to keep the old dump going.
Mountain Arena at that point was already a decade old. Built in 1966 just off Upper James St, now hidden from the main through way by being tucked in behind a gas station and a strip plaza. The Fincups planned to move here, but the locals said no way. With no time to fight that battle the team quickly moved to St. Catharines for the 1976-77 season. A lease was however worked out in time for the 1977-78 season, and Mountain Arena became home to the OHL. After one season however, when it appeared the city wasn’t moving quickly on an adequate replacement for the Forum, the team left again, this time for Brantford to become the Alexanders. Seven years later the city of Hamilton finally had Copps Coliseum in the works downtown, and with attendance lacking a bit in Brantford the team moved back to Hamilton to become the Steelhawks. However Copps was still a year away from opening, so the team spent one more season (1984-85) at Mountain Arena. While Copps was a great success at attracting everything other than an NHL team, the Steelhawks moved on and the famously inept Dukes of Hamilton moved in for a doomed two season stint before leaving for Guelph in 1991. During the Dukes’ 1990-91 season they even played some games at Mountain Arena when nobody was showing up to watch them play downtown.
That finally brings us to today, and believe it or not for a temporary two year spell from 2023-25 Mountain Arena was once again the largest indoor arena operating in the city. But we will get to that later. First is the whole point of this page, my review of attending a GOHL Kilty B’s game here.
As with many community arenas over the decades across the country, Mountain Arena has seen several renovations over its now 60 years of life. One of those renovations saw the addition of a new ice pad which now means the main entrance is actually around the back of the building and not the one you see in the photo above that faces Hester St. I never got to attend a game at the old Oshawa Civic Auditorium or even see it before it was torn down, but my friend OHLAG who had attended games there tells me that Mountain Arena is basically a clone of the Civic Auditorium except slightly smaller. Mountain Arena has about 7 rows of newer blue plastic seats that ring around the entire ice surface. Apparently, Oshawa had about 2-3 more rows. The roof is super low and flat with barely enough room for an elongated scoreboard above centre ice, which was a feature Oshawa also had. There are two concourses; one around the top of the bowl and another at ice level under the seats. However one side of this lower concourse is blocked off for Kilty B’s games near their dressing room. The visiting team’s side however isn’t blocked off, and you could just stroll right past their room and through their setup in the hallway. There are staircases in each of the four corners of the building connecting the upper and lower concourses, which is very similar to the setups in Brantford, Sherbrooke and the old London Gardens. There is also a stairway just off the new main back entrance of the building up to the top concourse, which spills you out right under the press box at centre ice behind the penalty boxes.
The building has a couple odd quirks. The weirdest one is that when walking the upper concourse, each corner of the building near the stairway is banked for some reason (the race fan in me loves this). Another is near each corner at the top of the side sections there is another small set of boards and glass and in front of those instead of the newer plastic seats they have the building’s original two-man wooden benches which were more comfortable than I expected, but also the dasher board jams into your back. The rink also has netting installed not just behind each net as is now customary but around the entire ice surface. So there is no way to get a view of the ice without netting in your way, unless you’re down on the bench. The ice surface itself is about ten feet shorter than regulation, but they seem to take that space from behind the net to the bottom of the faceoff circle as opposed to a shorter neutral zone like most rinks at 190 feet. One positive that I am always a sucker for are the walls are painted in Kilty B’s colours, and there are signs for the team all over the rink which is something every main tenant should have but not all do.
In 2023 the city of Hamilton declined an offer from Bulldogs owner Michael Andlauer to build a new 10,000 seat rink beside Lime Ridge Mall and decided to shut down Copps Coliseum for 18 months for a massive renovation to keep the downtown arena of 17,000 more current. With the now renamed Dave Andreychuk Mountain Arena the only other option, Andlauer was forced to move the Bulldogs to Brantford in what could’ve been a temporary situation. However there were many hurt feelings, and the city of Brantford fully embraced the Bulldogs when they got there to the point that they decided to stay and build a new arena there instead. With Copps shuttered (albeit temporarily) Mountain Arena once again became the biggest hockey spectator facility in a city of 570,000 people, which is mind boggling. The GOHL’s Kilty B’s also became the highest level of hockey in the city which again is just incomprehensible for a city of Hamilton’s size that isn’t directly attached to the GTA. Even though it’s GTA adjacent, it certainly has more of an identity then places like Mississauga or Burlington. While the city had decent to good support for its OHL team unlike their GTA counterparts, Hamilton does seem to be similar to the GTA in that a lower level of hockey like the GOHL just doesn’t interest anybody. On a cold February Saturday evening OHLAG and I attended a Kilty B’s game with a whopping attendance of 125 people. There was more St. Catharines Falcons merch in the stands than Kilty B’s and the atmosphere was nonexistent. Which is a shame considering how small and tight the rink is. If you could even get 1,000 people to show up the place would probably rock. Copps Coliseum is now open again, and it is heavily rumoured that the AHL will make its return in the fall of 2026 (not confirmed as of this writing) so I wouldn’t expect the Kilty B’s to take off in popularity anytime soon. I am happy to have attended a game here, in an arena that can boast that it was the former home of an OHL team. It’s a cool little barn that most people in the city wouldn’t even know about, tucked in behind the strip plazas of bustling Upper James Street.
