OHL Alumni Central

Fred Brathwaite played four seasons in the Ontario Hockey League from 1989-90 to 1992-93. He began his OHL career with the Oshawa Generals and played there until the midway point of the 1991-92 season when he shifted to the London Knights. His final season was played with the Detroit Junior Red Wings.

Fred was undrafted but went on to a nine year NHL career. The pinnacle of Brathwaite’s NHL career was 1999-00 and 2000-01 when he was the primary goalie with the Calgary Flames playing 61 and 49 regular season games. Throughout his NHL days, Fred also played for the Edmonton Oilers, St. Louis Blues and the Columbus Blue Jackets.

During the 2004-05 NHL strike season, Brathwaite ventured out into the European hockey scene and played with Kazan Ak-Bars of the Russian Super League. He returned the following season and Ak-Bars won the RSL championship.

Fred made an attempt at a return to the North American game, playing for the Chicago Wolves of the AHL for the 2006-07 season and part of the 2007-08 season. The Wolves are the AHL affiliate of the Atlanta Thrashers but Fred didn’t get a call-up to the NHL club.

Since 2008-09, Brathwaite has been a member of Adler Mannheim of Germany’s Deutsche Eishockey Liga (DEL). In his first season with the club, Fred was named the DEL Player Of The Year. The numbers that season included six shutouts, a goals against average of 2.37 and a save percentage of .925 in 49 regular season games.

Brathwaite returned to Adler Mannheim for the 2010-11 season. This will be his 18th season in professional hockey and his 21st since winning the Robertson Cup and Memorial Cup with the Oshawa Generals in his first season of Ontario Hockey League play.

Check out Fred Brathwaite’s profile page on the Adler Mannheim official website.

Changes are abound for Sundays at OHL Alumni Central. Out is Sensational Sunday Search For Sites and in is OHL Alumni Classics. SSSFS was a good idea but didn’t focus on what this site is all about, OHL Alumni. Classics will once a week bring you great articles on graduates of the Ontario Hockey League that have retired from active hockey and whose stories are great but not readily known.

Kevin Conway

Kevin Conway played four seasons in the Ontario Hockey League from 1980-81 to 1983-84. His first season consisted of only nine games with the Oshawa Generals. His second and third were played with the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds and his final season started with two games with the Sault before finishing the season with the Kingston Canadians.

After two seasons in the Ontario Hockey League, Conway had played just 45 regular season games while scoring seven goals and adding nine assists for 16 points. In his third and fourth season, Kevin’s offense exploded with seasons of 122 and 130 points.

In 1982-83, his 122 points placed him ninth in Ontario Hockey League scoring. The Greyhounds lost out to the Oshawa Generals in Robertson Cup finals. As a side note, that season was the first for the Guelph Platers and was also the first for the North Bay Centennials after moving from Niagara Falls where they were known as the Flyers.

In 1983-84, Conway was traded to the Kingston Canadians after just two games with the Greyhounds, despite contributing three goals in those two games. Despite the Canadians finishing last in the Leyden Division, Kevin’s 130 total points was good enough for sixth in the league. His 20 penalty minutes helped him win the William Hanley Trophy as the Ontario Hockey League’s Most Sportsmanlike Player.

Despite the numbers, Conway went undrafted by an NHL club. Kevin played one season in the old IHL, split between the Toledo Goaldiggers and the Salt Lake Golden Eagles, before moving to Great Britain and finding his calling as a hockey legend.

Conway put up rediculous numbers playing in the BNL. In his first season, he popped in 129 goals and added 98 assists for 227 points in just 35 games! These numbers would be topped in 1987-88 when he scored 151 goals in addition to 112 assists for a combined total of 263 points. This feat was done in just 31 games, 2 with the Durham Wasps and 29 with the Telford Tigers. He still found time to spend 108 minutes in the penalty box.

In all, Conway reached the 100 goal plateau four times in the BNL and the 100 point mark nine times. He played at various levels of British ice hockey until the end of the 2007-08 season.

Kevin represented Great Britain at the World Championships five different times. His 66 points as a member of the national team is second on the all-time list. His contribution to hockey in Great Britain had him elected to the British Ice Hockey Hall of Fame in 2005.

(Unless you’re a Windsor Spitfires or Oshawa Generals fan…)

Travis as a member of the DEL's Kolner Haie in 2007-08.

The only thing flawed about the career of Ontario Hockey League grad Travis Scott thus far is the single game he played in the National Hockey League. For such a great goaltender, the Los Angeles Kings gave him just one shot at playing in the NHL and he is left with an NHL career Goals Against Average of 7.20 and a save percentage of .700.

Everything else about Scott’s career in professional hockey has been exceptional and he is potentially one of the most under-rated goaltenders to ever come out of the Ontario Hockey League.

Travis played three seasons in the Ontario Hockey League from 1993-94 to 1995-96. His first two seasons were with the Windsor Spitfires and his final season was with the Oshawa Generals. His OHL career was less than stellar, he was not drafted to the NHL and played in the ECHL upon entering the world of professional hockey.

During the 1998-99 season while playing for the Mississippi Sea Wolves of the ECHL, Travis was named Playoff MVP as the team took the Kelly Cup.

From 1999-00 to 2004-05, Scott was a regular in the American Hockey League, playing for the Lowell Lock Monsters, Manchester Monarchs and San Antonio Rampage. His GAA never went above the 2.91 mark and pretty much fell each season he played. His save percentage over his final five seasons in the AHL was consistently above .920. Travis currently sits tied for 12th on the all-time AHL career shutouts list with 23.

In 2005-06, Travis made the move to European hockey and played for Magnitogorsk of the Russian Super League. The RSL is the predecessor to the KHL. His first season was simply amazing as he had eleven shutouts, a GAA of 1.22 and a whopping save percentage of .949 in 43 games. The following season, he backstopped the team to the RSL Championship. He took a short holiday in 2007 to join Team Canada at the Spengler Cup in Davos, Switzerland as Canada captured the gold at the invitational tournament.

He switched over to Austria for the 2008-09 season and played for Klagenfurt of the Erste Bank Eishockey Liga. He led Klagenfurt to an Austrian Championship while leading the league in GAA and save percentage.

This past season, 2009-10, he continued his winning ways in Germany with the Hannover Scorpions of the Deutsche Eishockey Liga. Travis led the league in save percentage and the Scorpions took the DEL crown.

Scott is back with Hannover for the upcoming 2010-11 season. The team shows no sign of stopping and should again be a contender in the German elite league.

Check out Travis Scott’s profile page at the Hannover Scorpions official website.

Travis also appeared in this previous post about Ontario Hockey League grads playing for Hannover’s Championship team.

Dustin VanBallegooie played four seasons in the Ontario Hockey League from 2000-01 to 2003-04 and played on four different OHL teams. His first full season in the Ontario Hockey League was the only spent with just one team. He began his OHL career with the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds.

VanBallegooie’s second season was split between the Greyhounds and the Oshawa Generals. Season three started with the Generals and ended with the Owen Sound Attack. His final season started in Owen Sound and ended in Toronto with the St. Michael’s Majors.

Following his Ontario Hockey League career, Dustin played three seasons with the Fresno Falcons of the East Coast Hockey League. In his last season with the Falcons, 2006-07, VanBallegooie was called up to the American Hockey League’s Bridgeport Sound Tigers for eleven games.

In his middle season with Fresno, Dustin gathered 40 points off 13 goals and 27 assists in 69 games. This was good enough to earn VanBallegooie a spot at the ECHL all-star game and got him voted in as Fresno’s Top Defenseman. Fresno finished first in their division but lost out in the Conference finals.

After a season with Duisburg in Germany’s Deutsche Eishockey Liga in 2007-08, VanBallegooie made the shift to Denmark’s AL-Bank Ligaen and will be entering his third season with Sønderjysk EliteSport for the 2010-11 season.

Dustin has enjoyed great success in Denmark. In both his first two seasons with SønderjyskE, the team has won the Danish championship. Both seasons, Dustin has led the league’s defensemen in goal scoring. Both seasons, he has been an all-star. This past season, Dustin’s 40 points in 35 games was not only good enough to lead all defensemen but was good enough to tie him for seventh in the league in overall points.

His game changed along with the team’s as he went from fourth in the league in penalty minutes during the 2008-09 season to getting just a third of that season’s total in the 2009-10 season. SønderjyskE was the least penalized team in the AL-Bank Ligaen this past season.

An interesting note about SønderjyskE is that they are the only team in the AL-Bank Ligaen that plays on a home rink that is NHL regulation size. The rest of the teams in the league play on rinks that are standard IIHF size.

There is no direct link to Dustin VanBallegooie’s profile page on the SønderjyskE official website but if you go to the site and select Ishockey and Spillertrup, you will go to the team’s roster and you can click on Dustin’s name there.

Check out previous posts on Ontario Hockey League alumni playing in Denmark’s AL-Bank Ligaen:

Neal Martin

Russ Moyer

The Kalamazoo Wings of the East Coast Hockey League have the good fortune to have retained the services of the two Ontario Hockey League grads for the upcoming 2010-11 season. Each of the grads comes from the two Ontario Hockey League teams located in the state of Michigan, the Plymouth Whalers and Saginaw Spirit.

Andrew Fournier played five seasons in the Ontario Hockey League from 2003-04 to 2007-08, all with the Plymouth Whalers, although his first season consisted of only three games. He was a part of the Robertson Cup winning Whalers in 2006-07. He came out offensively in his final season, scoring 35 goals and 40 assists for 75 points in 64 games which placed him second on the team in scoring. He captained the team in that final season.

Undrafted, Fournier played his first season of professional hockey in 2008-09. He split the campaign between the ECHL’s Florida Everblades and Dayton Bombers. This past season, his first with Kalamazoo, Andrew led the team in scoring with 27 goals and 44 assists for 71 points in 70 games.

Patrick Asselin played five seasons in the Ontario Hockey League from 2003-04 to 2007-08. His first four seasons were played with the Saginaw Spirit and during his final season, the Spirit traded him to the Oshawa Generals where he was to help a power-packed Generals team go deep into the playoffs. His 78 total points in his final season put him third on the Generals in scoring behind the dynamic duo of John Tavares and Brett MacLean.

In 2008-09, Asselin’s first year pro, he played in Germany’s Oberliga (third tier, behind DEL and Bundesliga) with Herne. He scored 39 goals and added 40 assists for 79 points in 50 games with Herne which placed him two points out of the top spot on the team in total points. He returned to North America and the East Coast Hockey League this past season, starting with the Idaho Steelheads and taking a turn with the Utah Grizzlies before ending up in Kalamazoo.

Check out Andrew Fournier’s and Patrick Asselin’s profile pages on the Kalamazoo Wings official website.