St. John’s native Colin Greening is a two-time Calder Cup winner after helping the Toronto Marlies capture their first-ever American Hockey League championship.
The Marlies defeated the Texas Stars 6-1 Thursday night in the seventh and deciding game of an AHL final played at Ricoh Coliseum in Toronto.
The 32-year-old Greening was a professional rookie with the Binghamton Senators who won the Calder Cup in 2011. Today, in contrast, he’s the assistant captain and second-oldest player on the Marlies, younger than teammate and fellow forward Chris Mueller by just three days.
Greening had four goals, five assists and a plus-eight rating in 20 Calder Cup playoff games with Toronto, following up on a regular season that saw him register 16 goals, 13 assists and a rating of plus nine in 73 outings.
Greening is one of seven players from Newfoundland and Labrador to be part of an AHL championship team, and now joins Grand Falls-Windsor native Don Howse, who won back-to-back Calder Cups with the Nova Scotia Voyageurs in 1976 and 1977, as the only two-time Calder Cup winners from the province.
Others who have won the Calder Cup are Brian Gibbons of St. John's (1971 Springfield Kings), Jason Morgan of Conception Bay South (2001 Saint John Flames), John Slaney of St. John's (2005 Philadelphia Phantoms), Zach O'Brien of St. John's (2015 Manchester Monarchs) and Danny Cleary of Harbour Grace (2017 Grand Rapids Griffins).
Cleary might be seen as having been more of an unofficial coach; he was listed as a player on the Griffins roster, but didn't skate in any regular-season or playoff games in 2016-17.
Two others from the province earned Calder Cup rings. Glenn Stanford of St. John's, now the CEO of the ECHL expansion Newfoundland Growlers, was president of the 2007 AHL champion Hamilton Bulldogs and Daryl Seward, a Lewisporte native who lives in Paradise, was an assistant coach with the 2016 Calder Cup champion Lake Erie Monsters.
In between his Calder Cup championships, Greening played parts of six seasons in the NHL with the Ottawa Senators and Toronto Maple Leafs, appearing in 286 games and registering 48 goals, 59 assists and 107 career NHL points.
Notes
This was the first Calder Cup to go the full distance since 2003 … You have to go back much further than that for the last time a Maple Leafs farm team won a Calder Cup. That was in 1982, when the New Brunswick Hawks, who were actually the shared affiliate of the Leafs and Chicago Blackhawks, took the crown. The New Brunswick lineup that season included Russ Adam, the Windsor, Ont., native who has lived in St. John’s for the last three decades ever since starring with the Newfoundland Senior Hockey League’s Capitals, and is the father of former NHLer Luke Adam ...
