The National Hockey League was formed on November 26, 1917. The "National" was originally a reference to Canada, where the first organized hockey leagues were created in the 1880s. The first professional league appeared in 1904; the International Hockey League had teams in the US and Canada, scattered around Lake Michigan, and lasted for only two years.
The NHL's immediate predecessor was the National Hockey Association, founded in 1909. The NHA was a troubled league, with owners who didn't get along very well. In particular, Eddie Livingstone, who owned the Toronto Blueshirts, was prone to causing conflict, and the other owners disliked him intensely. They had a secret meeting without Livingstone in 1917, at which they discussed the problem. The NHA's bylaws didn't allow them to kick Livingstone or the Blueshirts out of the league, so they did the next best thing: They voted to suspend operations of the NHA, and moved their teams into a new league, the National Hockey League. Morey Holzman and Joseph Nieforth tell the story of the NHL's turbulent birth in Deceptions and Doublecross (e-book).
It was a small league at first, with only four teams, and one of those didn't survive the entire first season. Bob Duff writes about that difficult year in The First Season (e-book). The league grew to ten teams by 1926, but the Great Depression was hard on the NHL, and by 1942, there were only six teams remaining.
Those six teams entered a long period of NHL stability, with no team changes from 1942 to 1967. Those teams and that era of the league's history have become known as "the Original Six." All of the Original Six teams—Boston Bruins, Chicago Black Hawks, Detroit Red Wings, Montreal Canadiens, New York Rangers, and Toronto Maple Leafs—are still with the league today. Lew Freedman tells their stories, and the history of the Original Six quarter-century, in The Original Six (e-book | print).
While the league's teams were constant during this era, there were important changes happening. The league's championship trophy, the Stanley Cup, had originally been created as a sort of national trophy, awarded to the best team from among several professional and amateur hockey leagues in Canada. The Western Canada Hockey League was the last serious rival for the Cup, and that league folded in 1926, making the Stanley Cup the unofficial NHL championship trophy. In 1947, the NHL and the Stanley Cup trustees reached an agreement giving full control of the Cup to the NHL, and it has been the league's official trophy ever since.
The NHL's color barrier was broken in 1948, when Larry Kwong played several games for the New York Rangers. In 1950, Art Dorrington was the first black Canadian to sign an NHL contract, but he never made it past the minor leagues; it wouldn't be until 1958 that Willie O'Ree became the first black player in an NHL game.
Hockey can be a dangerous game—powerful men moving very fast on sharp skates, carrying large sticks, slapping a puck through the air at high speed. Clint Benedict was the first goalie to wear a face mask, in 1930; it was a fairly primitive mask, and he wore it only while his broken nose was healing. Mask technology had improved enough by 1959 that Jacques Plante became the first goalie to routinely wear a mask, but some goalies continued to resist; Andy Brown was the last goalie to play without a mask, in 1974. Helmets for the rest of the players took even longer to catch on. In 1968, Bill Masterson became the only NHL player to die as a result of injuries suffered during a game. That led many players to begin wearing helmets, but the league didn't require them until 1979.
The conversation about expanding the NHL began in the early 1960s. Minor league teams were playing throughout the western United States and Canada, and there was some worry that the Western Hockey League might grow large enough to become a professional league, competing with the NHL for players. In 1967, the NHL doubled in size, adding six new teams, including the Los Angeles Kings. They added six more teams in the next few years, growing to eighteen teams in 1974. Stephen Laroche writes about the history of NHL expansion in Changing the Game (e-book | print).
A new rival appeared in the 1970s, the World Hockey Association. The WHA played mostly in smaller cities and offered higher salaries than the NHL. The two leagues had a hostile relationship, but the WHA's financial instability made them willing to discuss a merger. That merger happened in 1979, when the NHL absorbed four of the WHA's teams. The WHA merger took the NHL into another period of stability, lasting for more than a decade. The fall of the Iron Curtain and the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a large influx of players from eastern Europe beginning in the late 1980s, and that helped fuel another wave of expansion, with the league adding nine more teams between 1991 and 2000. Among them were the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, as they were known when they joined the NHL in 1993; they became the Anaheim Ducks in 2006.
All of that expansion wasn't without growing pains. Labor disputes disrupted the NHL season twice; a lockout cut the 1994-95 season to about half its length, and there was no 2004-05 season at all because of another lockout. Many of the expansion teams have moved, some more than once, when they struggled financially in their original city. But only one NHL team has ever folded entirely when the Cleveland Barons were merged into the Minnesota North Stars in 1977.
More expansion may be on the horizon. A 31st team, the Vegas Golden Knights, was added in 2017, and a Seattle group submitted a bid earlier this year, hoping to begin play in 2020.
For more on the history of the NHL, Scott Morrison offers highlights of the league's first century in 100 Years, 100 Moments (e-book), and Mike Commito provides daily hockey trivia in Hockey 365 (e-book).
Also This Week
November 27, 1896
Richard Strauss's tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) had its premiere performance in Frankfurt, with the composer conducting. The piece is inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche's novel of the same name (e-book | e-audio | print). The opening fanfare is the most recognized part of Strauss's music, familiar to many from its use in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, or from the jazz-funk interpretation by Deodato, which was a #2 pop hit in 1973.
November 28, 1931
Tomi Ungerer was born. Ungerer is best known in the United States as an author and illustrator of children's books, but in Europe, he's equally well-regarded for his satirical novels for adults and for his artworks. A museum in Strasbourg, France, where Ungerer was born, is devoted to his art. The documentary Far Out Isn't Far Enough looks at Ungerer's life and influential career.
November 28, 1948
Agnieszka Holland was born. Holland is a Polish-born director. She made only a few films before leaving Poland in 1981, shortly before the imposition of martial law, and has since worked throughout Europe and in the United States; in the last decade, she has worked frequently in American television. Holland's 1997 movie Washington Square (streaming | DVD) is an adaptation of the Henry James novel, starring Jennifer Jason Leigh and Albert Finney.
December 1, 1958
Candace Bushnell was born. Bushnell's mid-1990s newspaper columns about dating in New York were collected in Sex and the City (e-book | e-audio | print), which became the basis for a popular HBO television series. She has since written several more novels and specializes in witty studies of the personal and romantic lives of New York career women.