The Toronto Marlies are getting prepared for another AHL season to hopefully supply the Toronto Maple Leafs with some talent, and they just signed a 24-year-old forward with the best name in hockey.
Announced by the team on Tuesday, the Marlies signed a total of five players to AHL-only contracts. And right in there, nestled among them, is young winger Gunnarwolfe Fontaine.
✍️ NEWS | We’ve signed forwards Gunnarwolfe Fontaine, Ben King, Nick Rhéaume, Marko Sikic and defenceman Ryan McCleary pic.twitter.com/OGwdr4YaGf
— Toronto Marlies (@TorontoMarlies) July 8, 2025
Gunnarwolfe. Fontaine.
I remember first meeting Gunnarwolfe Fontaine during his draft year all the way back in 2020. Rumblings of a player from the prestigious Chicago Steel program down there in the USHL with a name that will make you instantly interested in the player perculated through the season. And it was then the Nashville Predators that took the plunge in the seventh round, at 202nd overall.
Since then, Fontaine has been percolating in college hockey, playing four seasons at Northeastern University and then playing a fifth collegiate year after transferring to Ohio State. After his college career was done and he wasn't signed by the Predators, he went and finished the season with the AHL's Iowa Wild, Minnesota's farm team, to play five games on a very bad minor-league squad.
Through his college career, he wasn't half bad. A total of 49 goals and 137 points scored in 171 games in the NCAA -- while he never had a point-per-game season, he always hovered around that marker.
No one truly knows if Fontaine will have a good impact at the AHL level. He had just a handful of professional games on a team that finished near the bottom of the entire league last season as his only example of what he can be. His collegiate career isn't outstanding but it's perfectly reasonable and the winger seems like a player worthy of an AHL contract for a season.
In addition to Gunnarwolfe Fontaine, the Marlies signed forwards Ben King, Nick Rheaume, Marko Sikic, and defenseman Ryan McCleary. All five new signings have been inked to one-year AHL contracts.
The Marlies are looking have a strong bounceback season after a middling campaign where they finished fourth in the North Division with a 37-23-4-8 record. In the very first round of the playoffs, they got swept by the Cleveland Monsters in the best-of-three series. Do these signings move the needle at all? Not particularly, but with not a whole lot of high-end talent on the roster, getting steady AHL depth is not nothing.
And now we get to regularly say "Gunnarwolfe Fontaine" as much as we want. That's a plus.