The NHL’s newest team officially got a name last week when it was announced that the expansion franchise in Las Vegas for 2017-18 will be known as the Vegas Golden Knights. The official colours will be steel grey (for strength and durability), gold (because Nevada is the largest producer of gold in the USA), red (for the Vegas skyline and the Red Rock canyons of the nearby desert), and black (for power and intensity.) Grey, Black and Gold are also the colours of the United States Military Academy at West Point, whose sports teams are known as the Black Knights, and where the new hockey team’s majority owner Bill Foley graduated in 1967.

There have actually been professional hockey teams in Las Vegas since 1970, and serious interest in an NHL team since 2007. The current ownership group has been involved in the discussion since the spring of 2014. The NHL authorized a formal expansion process on June 24, 2015 and made applications available to interested parties that July. It was then announced on July 21, 2015, that Las Vegas and Quebec City had applied. Nearly a year later, on June 22, 2016, it was announced that Las Vegas would become the NHL’s 31st team. Five months later, the team got its name. In about 11 more months, they’ll play their first game.

Things moved a lot faster when the NHL first expanded back in 1924! Yes, teams had been added – and subtracted and relocated – prior to this, but the admission of a second Montreal team and the first U.S. club for the 1924-25 season (which saw the league grow to six teams – although not the so-called “Original Six”) was the first true expansion.

There had been internal talks for a few years already, but the first public indication that the NHL was considering the addition of American teams came in March of 1924 when Colonel John Hammond, representing Madison Square Garden of New York, and Charles Adams of Boston were invited to Montreal during the Stanley Cup playoffs. Reports on March 20, 1924, had Adams confirming that he’d purchased an option on a franchise for Boston. Little more is heard again until September 26, but by September 30, the Boston Arena had agreed to give ice to Adams for his new team, and Art Ross had agreed to serve as the coach, manager and vice president.

The NHL wouldn’t actually confirm the new entries in Boston and Montreal until October 12, 1924; the Boston Professional Hockey Association, Inc. wasn’t officially formed until October 23; and formal approval of the franchises didn’t actually come until the NHL’s annual meeting in Montreal, on November 1, 1924. Even so, the two teams would play their first games against each other in Boston just one month later– meaning there was no time to waste!

On September 30, 1924, it had been reported that Boston would take over the now-defunct Seattle franchise of the rival Pacific Coast Hockey Association, but that story quickly proved false. Ross would sign a few over-the-hill PCHA veterans for the new Boston team, but mainly he was on the road for the next few weeks trying to recruit promising amateurs. Most of the players he assembled met up in Ross’s hometown of Montreal on November 14, 1924, and proceeded to Boston together by train. The team also got its name that day, and its colours too. Brown and yellow, same as Adams’ chain of grocery stores. (Black would replace the brown in the Bruins uniform in 1934–35.)

“An interesting item is connected with Pres. Adams’ partiality towards brown as the team color,” noted that day’s Boston Globe. “The pro magnate’s four thoroughbred [horses] are brown … his Guernsey cows are of the same color; brown is the predominating color among his Durco pigs on his Framingham estate, and the Rhode Island hens are brown, although Pres. Adams wouldn’t say whether or not the eggs they lay are of a brown color.” Browns was even considered as the team nickname, but Adams was concerned that people would call them the Brownies, which struck him as childish. The team name, of course, would be the Bruins.

The stories surrounding the Bruins name are all pretty much the same. Charles Adams held a contest, but had very definite ideas about what kind of name he wanted. He wanted the name to relate to “an untamed animal.” He wanted the animal to be big, strong, ferocious and smart. (Of course, it wouldn’t hurt if that animal happened to be brown!) A secretary in the team office is usually given credit for coming up with Bruins – which comes from an old English term for a Brown bear first used in a medieval children’s fable. In his book “The Bruins” famed hockey writer Brian McFarlane specifically names Bessie Moss, whom he says was a transplanted Canadian working for Art Ross in Boston. When I was working on my Art Ross biography, I asked McFarlane about the story – which had proven impossible for me to confirm. He was pretty sure he’d come across it in either an old book or newspaper story some time during his hockey travels in the 1970s, but no longer had the source among his collection.

Whoever and however they got the name, the Bruins hit the ice for their first practice on November 15, 1924, and played their first game on Thanksgiving night, Thursday, November 27. It was an exhibition game against the Sasktoon Sheiks of the Western Canada Hockey League. Boston lost 2-1. They would beat their expansion cousins from Montreal (who were not officially named the Maroons until the following season) by the same 2-1 score in their first NHL game on December 1, 1924. Still, it would be a long, trying, season for the Bruins, who finished that first year with a record of 6-24-0. Montreal was only slightly better at 9-19-2.

The NHL will be counting on a better showing by Vegas – but they’ll be hard pressed to match the Maroons, who improved so quickly they won the Stanley Cup in their second season, or the Bruins, who were champions by year five.

In my story last week, I made a brief mention of C.C. Pyle as the agent for both Red Grange and Suzanne Lenglen. Charles C. Pyle (sometimes referred to as “Cold Cash” Pyle, and more often as “Cash and Carry” Pyle) was responsible for bringing both stars to Toronto in the fall of 1926 … but he was looking to take something away with him too: the city’s professional hockey team – The Toronto St. Pats.

Suzanne Lenglen and her agent, C.C. Pyle.

Writing in the Toronto Daily Star on October 8, 1926 (a few days before Lenglen’s appearance in the city), W.A. Hewitt noted: “Cash-and-Carry Pyle, who has Red Grange and Suzanne Lenglen under his wing, is trying desperately to break into professional hockey…” Hewitt wrote that Pyle had recently raised his original offer of $200,000 to $400,000 in an effort to buy the New York Americans, the NHL’s first franchise in The Big Apple.

By the middle of November, shortly after Grange’s visit to Toronto, came stories that Pyle had now set his sights on breaking into the NHL through Toronto. He had asked the owners of the St. Patricks what it would take to buy their team and was reportedly told $200,000. Though he’d offered double that for the Americans, Pyle was said to consider this price too high for the Toronto team. (Conn Smythe – who would soon put together a syndicate to buy the St. Pats for $160,000 – told the Star in 1977 that the team “might have been worth $15,000.”)

The Toronto Telegram had the story of Pyle’s interest in the St. Pats first on November 19.
Other local papers, such as the Globe, shown here, didn’t have it until the next day.

While it appears there would be more serious offers from Montreal investors (who likely would have left he team in Toronto) in the coming weeks, it was widely reported that if Pyle bought the St. Pats, he would move them to Philadelphia. Smythe used this threat of losing the city’s NHL team to an American city to rally his own group of investors and save the team in Toronto. He closed his deal on February 14, 1927, and renamed the team the Maple Leafs.

How close did Toronto really come to losing its team in 1926? It’s hard to know for sure. But C.C. Pyle’s interest in hockey seems to have been genuine. In the spring of 1927, he and Red Grange bought a large rink in Los Angeles, made plans to build another in San Francisco, and announced their intention to establish a four-team California Professional Hockey League. The league would run until 1933, though Pyle and Grange sold their interests in it around 1929.

I like the chances of Team Canada wrapping up the World Cup of Hockey tonight in game two of the best-of-three final against Team Europe. I don’t mean to get ahead of things, but with gold medal wins at three of the last four Winter Olympics, and even at the last two World Championships (where we don’t get to play our best on best), Canadian men, as Wayne Gretzky said the other day, “seem to be getting better and strong.”

“Canada’s been Canada,” Gretzky said of the team’s performance at the World Cup. “We’ve been as good as we’ve ever been. We sell our sport worldwide, the game is getting bigger all the time, each and every year, but we seem to be getting better and better in our own country.”

“Everybody gets nervous and scared, are we losing our game? We’re never going to lose our game. It’s Canada’s game. I am just so impressed by how much depth and how many good players we have in this country.”

One big advantage we still have over all the other hockey countries – even those with much bigger populations than ours – is that (with the possible exception of Latvia) we’re the only country in the world where the majority of the top athletes want to play hockey. Perhaps the biggest threat to that going forward will be the crazy-high costs of the game forcing more and more of those top athletes to choose less expensive games like basketball and soccer. Global warming probably isn’t going to help either.

In the meantime, while it’s nice to be the best in the world at the sport we care about the most, winning global titles isn’t the only thing that make Canada’s game Canadian. It won’t stop people from worrying about the Americans taking over the NHL. Not when so many decisions coming out on the NHL head office in New York can appear to Canadians to be based solely (soullessly!) on business rather than a love of the game … like when the NHL chooses to place its next expansion team in Las Vegas instead of Quebec City, or when it never seems to consider Hamilton – although that probably has as much to do with the influence of the Toronto Maple Leafs as it does with an unpopular American NHL Commissioner.

One of the earliest warnings of a U.S. takeover of the NHL came in a Hamilton Spectator
story picked up by Toronto’s Globe newspaper on December 12, 1924.

When Las Vegas comes on board in 2017-18, that’ll make 24 U.S.-based teams to only seven in Canada. And before that, when the spring of 2017 comes around, we’re likely to hear plenty once again about how no Canadian team has won the Stanley Cup since 1993. And remember, not a single one of those seven Canadian teams even reached the playoffs last year! Of course the NHL is big business, but things like this hardly make hockey feel like Canada’s game.

But fear not! With the NHL gearing up to celebrate the 100th anniversary of its 1917 founding, it turns out that worrying about Americans taking over our game dates back almost as long as that. With Boston having just become the first U.S. entry in the NHL, one of the first voices of concern was sounded by the Hamilton Spectator in December of 1924. The newspaper warned that, with more American teams to come, “[t]he arenas across the border will be bigger than those in Canada, and the admission charges will be higher, which means that the United States magnates will be in a position to get the pick of the players.”

The Globe expressed Canadian fears with stories such as this one on September 26, 1925, although the story notes that it may be a while before the U.S. could produce enough good players. It also warns that a salary cap may be necessary to save Canadian teams.

New York would get its NHL franchise with the admission of the Americans – at the expense of Hamilton losing its Tigers! – in 1925-26, and the NHL would add a team in Pittsburgh that year too. Canadians were definitely starting to worry about a U.S. takeover, and The Globe in Toronto became the lead voice of that fear. On January 22, 1926, Sports Editor Frederick Wilson warned that Canadian cities could become nothing more than an afterthought as the NHL expanded into more and more populous U.S. cities with “their fat bank-rolls.” Canadian teams would be forced to sell out to American owners, leading to predictions of All-American leagues with cities like Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and others banding together to become little more than all-Canadian minor leagues.

Conn Smythe used stories like this one on November 20, 1926, to convince the owners of the Toronto St. Pats to sell the team to his group. He would rename the team the Maple Leafs.

Fears became even worse when the New York Rangers, Detroit Cougars (later the Red Wings) and Chicago Blackhawks entered the NHL in 1926-27. The NHL was now a 10-team circuit with six of those clubs in the United States. Canada would never again have the majority of NHL teams, yet all these years later, it’s still our game … although it would be nice to see the Stanley Cup paraded through the streets of a Canadian city some time soon!