Why be a Canuck?

The Niagara Falls Canucks have been part of this city since 1971. Fifty-five years, three families, two Ontario championships — and, in 2023, the return of something Niagara Falls had gone four decades without.

Before the Canucks: the Flyers years

Niagara Falls was once a Junior A town, and a very good one — though “Junior A” meant something different then.

The Niagara Falls Flyers arrived in 1960, relocated from Barrie by the Emms family, and played Ontario Hockey Association (OHA) Junior “A” hockey out of the Niagara Falls Memorial Arena as an affiliate of the Boston Bruins. In those days there was only one Junior A, and its championship was the Memorial Cup. The Flyers reached the final three times, losing to the Edmonton Oil Kings in 1963, then winning it all in 1965 and again in 1968 — four of the five games of that 1968 final were played on home ice at the Memorial Arena.

Then the ground shifted.

The first Flyers team was Tier I. In 1972 it was sold and moved to Sudbury, becoming the Sudbury Wolves — and a second Flyers team took its place the same year, playing Tier II Junior A out of the same Memorial Arena. By 1976 that team was owned by Russell Masterson, who two years earlier had taken over the Canucks.

That year the Emms family moved the St. Catharines Black Hawks to Niagara Falls and revived the Flyers name at Tier I. Masterson gave up his Tier II franchise to let it happen. The revived Flyers reached the OHA final in 1979, played two seasons in the newly renamed Ontario Hockey League, and left for North Bay in 1982.

Tier II Junior A hockey had left Niagara Falls in 1976. It would be forty-seven years before it came back.

1971: out of Stamford

The Canucks were born out of another team. The Stamford Hornets of the Niagara District Junior B Hockey League took a leave of absence for the 1970-71 season, and the Canucks took their place, beginning play in 1971-72 out of the Stamford Memorial Arena.

Among the coaches in those early years was Al Boone, whose era on the Niagara Falls Sports Wall of Fame runs from 1971 to 1990 — beginning the same year the Canucks did. He would coach a young goaltender named Frank Pietrangelo for two of his minor hockey seasons, and again during Frank’s one season with the Canucks.

The 1979-80 season proved a consequential one. Al’s roster that year included two Niagara Falls teenagers who would both reach the National Hockey League: Frank, later a Stanley Cup winner in Pittsburgh, and centre Marty Dallman, who went on to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Toronto Maple Leafs and the 1994 Olympics.

When the Niagara District league folded in 1979, the Canucks moved to the Golden Horseshoe Junior B loop, where they would spend the next four decades.

Three families

Russell Masterson took over the Canucks in 1974, and the team stayed in his family for the next forty years.

Masterson arrived with a career already behind him — coach and owner, Tier II Flyers, Major A and Junior B, with stops involving the Orillia Terriers, Hamilton Tigers and St. Catharines Athletic. He was inducted into the Niagara Falls Sports Wall of Fame as a Builder in 1991. The Canucks were what he did afterwards. The team later passed to his sons, Terry and Tim Masterson, who joined their father on the Wall of Fame as Builders in 2008.

Frank Pietrangelo and his wife, Kim, bought the Canucks in 2014. Frank had played a season for the Canucks in 1979-80 under Al Boone, then went on to the University of Minnesota, the Pittsburgh Penguins and a Stanley Cup in 1991. He returned to the Canucks as general manager and an assistant coach in 2011-12, and became head coach and director of hockey operations on purchasing the team.

In 2022, Brandon Boone and his wife, Jody, bought a half interest in the team. Brandon is Al’s son, and he and Frank have been friends for nearly fifty years. He serves as the team’s vice-president, general manager and director of community and minor hockey involvement. Frank is its president, director of hockey operations and head coach. That partnership continues today.

Brandon Boone, left, and Frank Pietrangelo.

The Devils years

For two seasons, from 1992 to 1994, the team played as the Niagara Falls Devils. The Canucks name returned in 1994 and has stayed ever since.

Chasing the Sutherland Cup

For a long stretch, the Canucks were one of the strongest Junior B teams in Ontario. They reached the Sutherland Cup final — the Ontario Junior B championship — six times: in 1987, 1989, 1996, 1998, 2006 and 2011.

In 2006 the Canucks took the Golden Horseshoe championship before falling in the final to the Cambridge Winterhawks, four games to one. The last Golden Horseshoe conference title came in 2019, another seven-game series, this one against the St. Catharines Falcons. The 2019-20 season was never finished, and 2020-21 was lost entirely.

Golden Horseshoe conference champions, 2019.

Three homes

The Canucks began at the Stamford Memorial Arena, and were still there in 1979-80, when Al Boone coached a team that included Frank.

Sometime after 1982 the team moved to the Niagara Falls Memorial Arena — into the building the Flyers had vacated on their way to North Bay. Built in 1950, it was where Niagara Falls had won a national championship. The Canucks spent much of their Junior B life there, and ran their own bar in the old Blue Line Room.

In 2010 the Memorial Arena closed, replaced by the Gale Centre: four ice pads, and a facility still unmatched anywhere in the Ontario Hockey Association. Rink 1 seats 2,170, with a seating and standing capacity of almost 2,300. Sixty years of Niagara Falls hockey moved across town with the Canucks.

Rink 1 at the Gale Centre — home since 2010.

The 2022-23 Canucks — the last Junior B team in the team’s history. The following summer, the Canucks were reclassified to Junior A.

2023: Junior A returns to Niagara Falls

Niagara was conspicuous by its absence.

Of the fifteen tourism regions Destination Ontario identifies across the province, every single one had at least one Junior A team — as many as six, in places. Niagara had none. The best junior-aged players in the region had to leave home to play the top level of amateur hockey in Canada.

In March, 2023 the Ontario Junior Hockey League invited applications for a single expansion franchise. Roughly eighty-five Ontario Hockey Association Junior B and Junior C teams and prospective ownership groups were eligible to apply.

What followed was not a formality. Frank Pietrangelo and Brandon Boone submitted a 126-page application and a ninety-slide presentation, then went through months of interviews, financial scrutiny and league approvals.

On June 26, 2023, the Canucks were named the successful applicant.

Reclassification carried a substantial franchise fee, paid on entry to the league, along with the cost of operating at a level the team had not played at in decades: a longer schedule, longer travel, professional broadcast obligations, and a billet program for players drawn from across Ontario and beyond. None of it was publicly funded. It was private money, at private risk, put up by two Niagara Falls families who believed the city would support the return of top-level junior hockey.

After fifty-two seasons in Junior B, the Canucks joined the OJHL for 2023-24.

Forty-seven years after Russell Masterson gave up his Tier II franchise, Frank Pietrangelo and Brandon Boone brought that level of hockey back to Niagara Falls.

Where we are now

In 2024, Frank Pietrangelo and Brandon Boone were jointly named recipients of the Doug Austin Award, presented each year by the Niagara Falls Review to those who have made a significant contribution to the local sports scene — recognition, in large part, of bringing Junior A hockey back to Niagara Falls.

The Canucks host the OJHL Governors’ Showcase, which brings all twenty-four league teams and more than 150 scouts from the National Hockey League, the Canadian Hockey League, the National Collegiate Athletic Association and U SPORTS to the Gale Centre. The team finished top ten in the OJHL for attendance in 2025-26. And the roster is full of Niagara players — including OHL draft picks — who no longer have to leave home to play at this level.

In the Gale Centre foyer, a few steps from the ice, the Sports Wall of Fame carries the names of Russell Masterson, Terry and Tim Masterson, Al Boone and Frank Pietrangelo.

Fifty-five years on, the team’s history hangs in its own lobby.