Arena history, dead heat on the ice bind Roadrunners to Gulls as AHL clubs renew rivalry

There’s no team the Tucson Roadrunners know better than the San Diego Gulls. The two Pacific Division stalwarts have traded paint 56 times over the past six seasons, the most Tucson has seen of any opponent.

And with the series’ seventh installment set to begin when Tucson travels to San Diego Wednesday at 8 p.m., the ties that bind these rivals are strong as they ever were.

“There’s a team that’s historically brought the best out of us,” Tucson coach Steve Potvin said ahead of the first of eight meetings between the Roadrunners and Gulls this season. “It’s been close to 50/50 at this point.”

Over the last three seasons, San Diego and Tucson have met 24 times on the ice. The end result? Twelve wins apiece with all three seasons ending with exactly four wins and four losses to both teams. The only real semblance of any separation over that time frame came in virtually the last seconds of regulation in last game between the two teams last season.

The Gulls scored with 7 seconds left to send the game into overtime. Tucson prevailed in a shootout that night, but San Diego’s ability to push the game past regulation earned the Gulls the slightest of upper hands via that one extra point in the standings.

The series winner gets the Interstate 8 Border Rivalry Trophy (yes, that’s a thing). It’s named for the 350 mile portion of the 409-mile total trek from downtown Tucson to San Diego’s Pechanga Arena. While Tucson last won the trophy outright in 2018-19, the cup somehow stuck around Southern Arizona even after the Gulls’ technical victory. It’s still in the Roadrunners’ home offices.

The teams play eight times this season now through the last weekend of March, and anything but another 4-4 split will surely send the trophy to its rightful owner.

In the first years since the AHL’s westernmost expansion, San Diego played the role of Tucson’s most natural geographic rival (even if the Gulls were closer themselves both in geography and the goal of Southern California supremacy to the Ontario Reign). Now, though, both the Henderson Silver Knights (405 miles door-to-door) and Coachella Valley Firebirds (388 miles) are a hair closer to Tucson Arena’s front entrance.

Both of those teams are playing in brand new facilities: Henderson’s Dollar Loan Center opened in the spring and Coachella Valley’s Acrisure Arena will be christened next month. That twist presents yet another parallel to the Roadrunners and Gulls: Tucson and San Diego play in the two oldest arenas in the AHL’s Pacific Division.

“You can smell the history. You can smell the old Zambonis. You can smell the popcorn in those rinks,” Potvin said, noting that now that he’s behind the bench in a suit and tie, “it kind of brings you back to when you were playing.”

Pechanga Arena, known for most of its life as the San Diego Sports Arena, opened in 1966. Tucson Arena opened in 1972. They’re the eighth-and-ninth-oldest buildings in the AHL, respectively.

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The arenas’ shared history goes beyond hockey.

Consider Tucson’s home outing last Saturday against the San Jose Sharks — a 6-3 come-from-behind Roadrunners’ victory. Late in that matchup, Tucson and San Jose players tussled in the southeast corner of the rink, just as the Tucson Arena game operations crew blared Elton John’s “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” over the loudspeaker. That skirmish took place less than 50 feet from where the musical legend himself sang the same song live back as recently as March 2017.

Dating back to the early 1970s, John — who played his final North American concert on Sunday at Dodger Stadium — performed multiple times at both the Tucson Arena and San Diego Sports Arena. He’s one of a number of world famous acts to plug in at the modest-sized buildings. The others: Led Zeppelin, Elvis Presley, Cher, U2, The Rolling Stones, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers and Tina Turner. Turner, alongside then-husband Ike Turner, was the first musical act to take the floor at Tucson Arena the year it opened in 1972. She most recently played what is now Pechanga Arena in 2000.

“A brand new facility, a new arena, doesn’t have that history. It doesn’t have that mileage to be able to say it’s got that character,” said Roadrunners president Bob Hoffman. “Older buildings have the ability to be upgraded, or new features, or new bells and whistles like we’ve seen over the last past couple years, and like we’re doing in the future here (in Tucson).

“But you have to have some longevity in order to build that character and have that charm.”

And other than San Diego and Tucson, only the Scotiabank Saddledome (1982), home now to the Calgary Wranglers now that they’ve moved from Stockton, Calif., opened prior to the late 1990s.

“I love playing in old barns like this,” said forward Adam Cracknell, the Roadrunners’ captain this season, of Tucson Arena.

Cracknell also played a season in San Diego too, back in 2018-19, and was a divisional foe with Bakersfield the last two years. He knows Pechanga Arena well.

“We drew really well,” he said. “Obviously that’s a big sports city with the professional sports teams, and to be one of the ones to play in that big rink, it was a lot of fun.”