If the upcoming season of Ontario Reign hockey could be described in a single word, it would be ‘change.’ The organization is entering a transitional phase at nearly every turn.
As announced earlier this summer, former coach Marco Sturm has moved on to the Boston Bruins and given way to newly hired Andrew Lord. At just 40 years old, the British Columbia native has travelled the globe to both play and coach hockey. Lord played in college, the ECHL, AHL, and overseas. His North American coaching career began with ECHL Greenville and most recently had him behind the bench with Halifax in the QMJHL.
Get to know him in an extended interview recently provided via Kings Of The Podcast.
Forwards
After loading up on veteran players last season, the Reign roster and been restocked with a fresh supply of Kings prospects up front. Coupled with the departures of familiar faces such as Charles Hudon and Samuel Fagemo, Lord now faces the task of developing a fresh wave of young talent in Ontario this season.
Kings draft picks Koehn Ziemmer and Jared Wright gained brief experience with the club late last season, while promising prospect Kenny Connors is poised to make his AHL debut soon. Highly touted prospects such as Martin Chromiak and Francesco Pinelli are both set to return for a critical stage in their development — as expectations continue to rise.
Former Kings draft pick Jack Hughes signed an AHL-only contract in advance of his first season in pro hockey, yet the Reign will still have a foundation of experience to lean on, with centerman Glenn Gawdin and fan favorite Jacob Doty leading the way. They’ll be joined by a pair of key additions in Cole Guttman and Logan Brown, both on two-way NHL contracts (i.e. depth moves). Additionally, the club re-signed forward Taylor Ward to a one-year, two-way contract. Ward has been a key contributor in recent seasons and even earned a late-season NHL call-up by LA.
With a handful of young Kings prospects coming in at forward, how Lord integrates Ontario’s influx of new talent will be a key storyline to watch this season. More on Ontario’s newest players graduating from college and junior hockey can be found in these videos:
Defense and Goaltending
Perhaps the biggest blueline question comes from the endless debate of right vs. left shot pairings. Just like the above mentioned forward group, Kings prospects will be a key topic throughout the upcoming season — and three of them are left shots. Jakob Dvorak and Angus Booth, both AHL rookies last season, will be joined by the ultra-hyped Kirill Kirsanov. He’s a 6-foot-2 Russian selected by LA back in 2021. After plying his trade in the KHL (and their AHL comparable, the VHL) for a few seasons, he’s now signed an NHL entry level contract and has moved to North America.
Add in veteran Joe Hicketts and the team would already have four left shot defensemen. However, they also signed 6-foot-4 Samuel Bolduc too. And, yes, that now gives the team five lefties.
From the Kings potent 2022 Draft class, Otto Salin has come over from Finland. He can seemingly do it all, and should definitely see time on the power play. His three regular season games at the end of last year — along with one playoff game — gave the 21-year-old rearguard a small taste of what’s to come.
Booth could be the key to everything. He showed tremendous poise last season after several impressive stints at Kings Development Camp in prior summers. He was arguably Ontario’s best all-around defenseman in 2024-25. Can he build on that steady play over the course of the coming campaign? We shall see.
For more on Booth and Dvorak, two of the Kings top defensive prospects, see here:
In goal, this will be more of a rinse and repeat type of situation with Kings prospect Erik Portillo expected to lead the way with veteran Pheonix Copley available as a reliable safety valve. The former will be looking to get things back on track after he missed the last few months of 2024-25 with an injury. Meanwhile, Copley won’t handover anything without a fight. He loves to play and has proven to be more than capable of helping the Reign win games, so he’ll most likely be pushing for starts all season long.
Projected Reign Lineup 2025-26
While much of this will be sorted out during training camp, below gives us an early look at how things may unfold.
Wright – Gawdin – Chromiak
Pinelli – Guttman – Ziemmer
Lee – Brown – Ward
Connors – Lawrence – Jamsen
Hughes – Doty
Hicketts – Salin
Bolduc – Dvorak
Booth – Millar
Kirsanov
Portillo
Copley
Finally, it’s worth noting there are a few names missing from this article who are likely to enter the chat late in training camp. With the Kings set to have 15 forwards and eight defensemen fighting for 21 spots total, that leaves two players too many. Waivers will come into play if everybody is healthy, and assuming there are no trades between now and early October, one or more names from this group could potentially start the year in Ontario: Jeff Malott, Akil Thomas, Jacob Moverare, and/or Kyle Burroughs. To make things easy, we excluded those guys from this article, as that’s really more of a conversation about the Kings roster — something previously reviewed in the article linked below.
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Lead photo by Megan Sanders
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