The Houston Aeros were a professional ice hockey team in the International Hockey League (IHL) and the American Hockey League (AHL). The team played in Houston, Texas, at The Summit (renamed Compaq Center in 1998) from 1994 until 2003 and the Toyota Center from 2003 to 2013. In the IHL, the team operated as an independent minor league team from 1994 to 2001, though the team occasionally accepted players on loan from various National Hockey League (NHL) clubs for development. Upon joining the AHL for the 2001–02 season, they became the primary affiliate of the one-year-old NHL expansion team, the Minnesota Wild, a partnership they maintained until the franchise's relocation in 2013. While the team's only formal partnership with the Dallas Stars was a partial affiliation agreement during the 2004–05 season, Dallas occasionally sent some of their prospects to the Aeros on individual loans from 1993 to 2005, until the establishment of the Iowa Stars gave Dallas its own primary farm team. As 2022, Jared Spurgeon, Matt Dumba, and Jonas Brodin are the only players still in the Minnesota Wild system who had once spent time in Houston. History IHL years The Houston Aeros started out as an expansion franchise in the International Hockey League (IHL) in 1994 with home games at The Summit. The team's name was a tribute to the original Houston Aeros of the World Hockey Association in the 1970s, who won the Avco World Trophy twice with hockey legend Gordie Howe anchoring the team. The Aeros were the second IHL team to be named after a WHA franchise, the first being the Phoenix Roadrunners; unlike the Roadrunners, who used the same logo as their WHA predecessor, the IHL Aeros used a new logo, a Douglas B-23 Dragon bomber underneath a stylized wordmark. The original color scheme was forest green, navy blue, and a red accents on jerseys. The team was an immediate success, both on the ice and at the gate. The Aeros posted a winning record in their inaugural season and made the playoffs, while the team repeatedly sold out its home games at The Summit after not having professional hockey in the region for nearly two decades. Despite missing the playoffs in their sophomore campaign, the Aeros spent the back half of the 1990s becoming one of the more dominant teams of the IHL. Independently owned and operated by Chuck Watson without a primary