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A real-life game of dominoes broke out across Canada in the Ontario Hockey League and the American Hockey League on Thursday, with three teams changing cities.

Left without a domino is Belleville, Ont., which lost the OHL Bulls to Hamilton beginning next season. St. John's, which bid the Winnipeg Jets' AHL team goodbye on the same day it welcomed the Montreal Canadiens' AHL farm team, the Hamilton Bulldogs, as a replacement, is expected to suffer the same fate in two years.

The Canadiens announced their farm team will play in St. John's "for the 2015-16 and 2016-17 seasons." In 2017, a 10,000-seat arena under construction in the Montreal suburb of Laval is expected to be finished and the Canadiens plan to have their farm team play there.

The dizzying series of moves by the OHL junior circuit and the minor-professional AHL and their NHL parent teams had been the subject of rumours in recent days.

The first domino to fall was the Bulls, when news broke that majority owner Gord Simmonds sold the OHL team to Michael Andlauer, who has owned the Bulldogs since 2004. The Bulls, which have been in Belleville since 1981, were a victim of poor attendance, as their average crowd for the past four seasons was never much higher than 2,500.

Andlauer has been trying to buy an OHL team since it became known in the past year that he and the Canadiens planned to move the Bulldogs into the arena in Laval. Andlauer retained the rights to the Bulldogs name and the OHL Bulls will be rechristened the Hamilton Bulldogs.

Then the Jets and Canadiens simultaneously announced the moves of their AHL farm teams. The Jets said the St. John's IceCaps will move back to Winnipeg next season, where the team will play at the MTS Centre along with the NHL Jets. It is expected the AHL team will revive its Manitoba Moose moniker, the one it had until 2011 when the arrival of the Jets from Atlanta forced a move to St. John's.

The IceCaps name will be handed over to the Canadiens' farm team for its short stay in St. John's. This move also involved a sale, as Andlauer, who is a minority owner of the Canadiens, sold the AHL Bulldogs to its NHL parent team.

All of the AHL moves are tied to a recent financial strategy of many NHL teams to move their farm teams as close as possible to them. The faster an NHL team can shuffle a player to the AHL, the faster it can save money under the league's salary cap as his lower minor-league salary kicks in.

Next season, the AHL will realign to add a new Pacific Division to accommodate five western NHL teams – the Calgary Flames, Edmonton Oilers, San Jose Sharks, Los Angeles Kings and Anaheim Ducks – who moved their AHL affiliates to California. The Jets are expected to keep their AHL team in Winnipeg with the expectation the attraction of lower minor-league prices will attract enough fans to make it work.

"This transition allows us to move forward with a more permanent solution for our fans and an answer to the long-term health of hockey in Hamilton," Andlauer said in a statement released by the Bulldogs. "We're very excited about joining the OHL for the 2015-16 season."

The Bulldogs moved to Hamilton in 1996 as a farm team of the Oilers. But local hockey fans, long spurned by the NHL in various attempts to land a team, never warmed up to AHL hockey. The Bulldogs are averaging just 4,069 fans a game this season in the 17,383-seat FirstOntario Centre. Andlauer would like to see a smaller arena built in downtown Hamilton for his junior team.

Andlauer's purchase of the Bulls was bad news for Erie Otters owner Sherry Bassin, who has been trying to sell his team as the result of losing a $4.6-million (U.S.) lawsuit to Oilers owner Daryl Katz. That U.S. court judgment stemmed from a loan Katz made to Bassin in 2012 as part of a plan to buy the Otters and move them to Hamilton if the FirstOntario Centre lease could be wrested away from Andlauer.

At the time, Katz was in negotiations with the City of Edmonton about a new arena for the Oilers. Gaining control of the Hamilton arena lease would have allowed Katz to use the possibility of moving his NHL team to Hamilton as leverage against the Edmonton politicians. But that possibility ended when Hamilton officials decided to stick with Andlauer.

Bassin is still trying to sell the Otters so he can settle the debt to Katz. Several groups are looking at the team, but the loss of a serious buyer like Andlauer was a disappointment. Bassin could not be immediately reached for comment.

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