Around The AHL: Gordon looks back to guide the future

Lehigh Valley Phantoms head coach Scott Gordon has an excellent memory, so much so that he could recall his first AHL preseason road trip as a rookie with the Fredericton Express in the fall of 1986.

Up until that point, he had been accustomed to the light travel schedule that four seasons with Boston College had provided.

The AHL, he quickly learned, provided an altogether different test for its prospects, especially during its no-holds-barred 1980s era. Some 90 minutes into a trip from Fredericton to Halifax, he calculated that the team bus still had three hours to go snaking through the highways of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. An express ride this Express bus was not.