History of the National Hockey League
"China Clipper" Larry Kwong becomes the first non-white player in the league, breaking the NHL colour barrier in 1948, when he played for the New York Rangers.
Increased use of defence-focused systems helped cause scoring to fall in the late 1990s, leading some to argue that the NHL's talent pool had been diluted by 1990s expansion.
The Victoria Cougars are the last non-NHL team to win the Stanley Cup, having defeated the Canadiens in 1925,[19] and lost to the Montreal Maroons in 1926,[20] respectively.
[21] Defence dominated the NHL, and in the 1928–29 season, Canadiens goaltender George Hainsworth set what remains a league record with 22 shutouts in 44 games.
[25] In early 1927, the Toronto franchise was sold to Conn Smythe,[26] who renamed it to the Maple Leafs,[27] and successfully promised to win the Stanley Cup in five years.
[37] When Morenz scored against the Canadiens on the last day of the 1935 season, Montreal fans voiced their opinion, giving him a standing ovation.
[38] He suffered a broken leg in four places, and died on March 8 of a coronary embolism; 50,000 people filed past Morenz's casket at centre ice of the Montreal Forum to pay their last respects.
[43] In the playoffs, however, the Hawks upset the Canadiens, New York Americans, and the Maple Leafs to become the only team in NHL history to win the Stanley Cup despite a losing regular-season record.
[43] In the 1942 Stanley Cup Finals, the heavily favoured Toronto Maple Leafs were facing an upset, having fallen 3–0 in the seven-game series to the fifth-place Detroit Red Wings.
[46] With only five returning players from the previous season, New York Rangers general manager Lester Patrick suggested suspending his team's play for the duration of the war but was persuaded otherwise.
For the first 21 years of his presidency, the same six teams (located in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Montreal, New York, and Toronto) competed for the Stanley Cup and that period has been called the "golden age of hockey".
[50] The first official All-Star Game took place at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto on October 13, 1947, to raise money for the newly created NHL Pension Society.
[54] In March 1955, Richard was suspended for the remainder of the season, including the playoffs, after he received a match penalty for slashing Boston's Hal Laycoe then punching a linesman who attempted to intervene.
[55] The suspension touched off a wave of anger towards league president Clarence Campbell, who was warned not to attend a scheduled game in Montreal after receiving numerous death threats, mainly from French-Canadians accusing him of anti-French bias.
[62] Twenty-nine years later, on November 1, 1959, in a game against New York Rangers Jacques Plante made the goaltender mask a permanent fixture in hockey.
[66] Led by Alan Eagleson, the National Hockey League Players' Association (NHLPA) was formed in 1967[67] and it quickly received acceptance from the owners.
[74] In 1963, Rangers governor William Jennings introduced to his peers the idea of expanding the league to the American West Coast by adding two new teams for the 1964–65 season.
[79] On January 13, 1968, North Stars' rookie Bill Masterton became the first, and to date, only player to die as a result of injuries suffered during an NHL game.
[85] A gifted scorer, Orr revolutionized defencemen's impact on the offensive part of the game, as blue-liners began to be judged on how well they created goals in addition to how well they prevented them.
Orr finished with 270 goals and 915 points in 657 games, and he won the Hart Memorial Trophy as league Most Valuable Player thrice.
[98] In 1976, for the first time in four decades, the NHL approved franchise relocations; the Scouts moved after just two years in Kansas City to Denver to become the Colorado Rockies, while the California Golden Seals became the Cleveland Barons.
[106] The Islanders dominated both the regular season and the playoffs with the likes of Billy Smith, Mike Bossy, Denis Potvin, and Bryan Trottier.
[121] Börje Salming was the first European star in the NHL and Finns Jari Kurri and Esa Tikkanen helped lead the Oilers dynasty of the 1980s.
[124] Shortly before the end of the 1988–89 regular season, Flames general manager Cliff Fletcher announced that he had reached an agreement with Soviet authorities that allowed Sergei Pryakhin to play in North America.
[126] The NHL quickly announced three new teams: The San Jose Sharks, who began play in the 1991–92 season, and the Ottawa Senators and Tampa Bay Lightning, who followed a year later.
The revenue disparity between large and small market teams, exacerbated by the falling value of the Canadian Dollar, forced the Quebec Nordiques to move to Denver and become the Colorado Avalanche in 1995; the Winnipeg Jets relocated to Phoenix, Arizona, becoming the Coyotes, the next year.
The Sabres hosted the 2008 NHL Winter Classic on New Year's Day 2008, losing to the Pittsburgh Penguins in a shootout before a crowd of 71,217 at Ralph Wilson Stadium.
The league then took control over the team later that year in order to stabilize the club's operations, with the hopes of eventually reselling it to a new owner who would be committed to stay in the Phoenix market.
[155] The financially struggling Atlanta Thrashers were eventually sold to True North Sports and Entertainment in 2011, who then relocated the team to Winnipeg, a stark reversal of the league's Southward expansion more than a decade earlier.
Just after 5 am on January 6, 2013, after approximately 16 continuous hours of negotiating, the NHL and the players' union reached a tentative deal on a new collective bargaining agreement to end the lockout.
