Royals Sign Taylor

READING, PA – The Reading Royals of the ECHL, affiliate of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Boston Bruins of the National Hockey League and the Toronto Marlies of the American Hockey League, today announced that the team has signed former St. Lawrence forward Max Taylor. Last season, Taylor (5’10/185) (25), who hails from Ottawa, Ontario, played four games for the Royals and scored five goals. Taylor also played fifteen AHL games with the Marlies last year and scored six goals and picked up a pair of assists (eight points) in those games.

At the beginning 2008-09 season, Taylor, who was under contract with the Marlies, was continuing his medical rehabilitation of an upper body injury sustained in the 2008 ECHL playoffs while a member of the Texas Wildcatters. After gaining clearance to play in early December, Taylor was loaned to the Royals, who had acquired his ECHL rights from the Johnstown Chiefs for future considerations. (Johnstown had acquired Taylor’s rights from the Ontario Reign, who, as the continuation of the Wildcatter ECHL membership, had retained the rights to protected Texas players). Taylor had an immediate impact upon his arrival to the Royals, scoring a power play goal 14:25 into the first period of his first game with the team (on December 10, 2008) to give the Royals a 3-0 lead over the Dayton Bombers, which the team would eventually preserve in a 5-4 victory. In his second game with the team, Taylor had even a larger impact, becoming the first player in team history to score all three goals—including what proved to be the game winner—in a single game for the Royals in the team’s 3-2 win over the Elmira Jackals on December 12. Taylor would score one more goal for Reading before being recalled to Toronto on December 17. Taylor scored in his second game back with the Marlies (a 4-3 shootout loss to the Providence Bruins on December 19), but perhaps made his biggest impact with Toronto when he scored the final three goals of the game in Marlies’ 6-1 win over the Philadelphia Phantoms on January 3, 2009. However, due to injury, Taylor played his last game of the season, a 3-2 shootout loss for the Marlies to the Houston Aeros, on January 16.

In his rookie season, 2007-08, Taylor, whose brother Danny is a former goaltender for the Royals, scored twenty-five goals and picked up twenty assists (forty-five points) in fifty-seven regular season games with the Wildcatters. Taylor, who had a stellar four year collegiate career at St. Lawrence University prior to turning pro, was called up to the Toronto Marlies in early March of 2008, where he scored two goals and assisted on three others in thirteen AHL games before being returned to the Wildcatters for their playoff run. Taylor was the second leading scorer for the Wildcatters in the ECHL playoffs, racking up five goals and six assists (eleven points) despite being limited only six playoff games. On April 20, 2008, in Game Two of the South Division Semi-Final match-up with the Columbia Inferno, Taylor scored three goals, including the game winner, and picked up two assists in the Wildcatters 6-2 win over the Inferno. However, Taylor sustained what proved to be a season ending injury late in that game.

The Royals open the 2009-10 ECHL season on Thursday, October 15, 2009 (7:05 pm) when the Kalamazoo Wings make their first visit ever to the Sovereign Center in Reading, Pennsylvania.