1979 NHL expansion
The agreement officially took effect on June 22; it ended the seven-year existence of the WHA and re-established the NHL as the sole major league in North American professional ice hockey.
[1] The two leagues had discussed the possibility of some sort of amalgamation for numerous years, despite the acrimonious relationship between the two after the WHA aggressively recruited NHL players upon the former's founding in 1971.
[5][page needed] Former Chicago Black Hawks star Bobby Hull lent immediate credibility to the fledgling circuit when he signed a ten-year contract with the Winnipeg Jets for $2.7 million, the largest deal in hockey history at the time.
[5][page needed] The NHL attempted in court to block the defections, earning an injunction against the Jets that initially prevented several players, including Hull, from playing in the WHA.
[5][page needed] Since hockey salaries were among the lowest in professional sports at the time, a key part of the WHA's business plan was to place franchises like the Edmonton Oilers, Winnipeg Jets, Ottawa Nationals, and Quebec Nordiques in mid-sized Canadian markets, cities the NHL had previously rejected for expansion franchises but which, the WHA thought, could sustain major professional teams in the process.
The WHA also challenged the older league more directly by placing teams like the Philadelphia Blazers, New York Golden Blades, Toronto Toros, and Chicago Cougars in NHL markets.
Attempts at reconciliation were frequently blocked by Toronto's Harold Ballard, Chicago's Bill Wirtz, and Boston's Paul A. Mooney, owners of the three NHL teams most affected by the WHA's player raids.
"[8] Despite this animosity in mind within both league, some NHL teams agreed to play preseason exhibition games against WHA opponents prior to the 1974–75 season.
Under Ziegler's presidency, interleague exhibition games became more common, eventually involving every NHL team except for Los Angeles, Buffalo, Toronto, and Montreal.
While this may have been in part because Canadian Hockey Night in Canada television revenues were mostly distributed among the three Canadian teams instead of across the league, an additional factor was that star Québécois players were long accustomed to playing in their home province, and even with the draft in effect, these players (in particular, Guy Lafleur) successfully leveraged the threat of signing with the Nordiques to ensure the Canadiens were able to acquire their NHL rights instead.
American support for a merger, however, was based on the assumption that all existing NHL teams would share the expansion fees equally; this did not go over well with the league's Canadian owners by comparison.
The objection was not without precedent; in 1970, Montreal and Toronto had only agreed to support Vancouver's addition to the NHL after they were paid indemnities for the inclusion of the Canucks in the Hockey Night in Canada television deal.
[5][page needed] The Calgary Cowboys, who had hoped to be one of the six teams to join the NHL, subsequently folded, as did the Phoenix Roadrunners, Minnesota Fighting Saints, and San Diego Mariners.
Ziegler was able to mitigate the damage by arranging a merger between the two clubs; the Barons currently remain the most recent example of an American professional sports team in an established major league ceasing operations as of 2025.
Of the three Sun Belt teams that had joined the league since 1967, one (the California Golden Seals) had already relocated and had later become defunct altogether while the two (the Los Angeles Kings and Atlanta Flames) were struggling financially.
However, the Racers left the league with a key piece of leverage when flamboyant owner Nelson Skalbania signed 17-year-old superstar Wayne Gretzky to a lucrative personal services contract.
He knew the Racers would not be part of any merger, but he hoped to keep them alive just long enough to reap a major windfall from selling the highly touted Gretzky's rights to someone else in the NHL.
Skalbania ultimately could not meet his obligations (thus leading to his own team's demise) and opted to sell Gretzky's contract to Oilers owner Peter Pocklington instead.
Unlike Skalbania, Pocklington was better financed at the time and owned a team that was much better supported and thus, more reasonably stable by WHA standards, and were all but certain to be part of a merger deal with the NHL.
The two leagues eventually reached an agreement in March 1979 to grant expansion franchises in four of the WHA's cities, pending ratification by the NHL's owners.
[11] At a March 8, 1979 meeting in Key Largo, Florida, 12 of the 17 owners supported the proposal—one short of the required three-fourths majority (13 teams out of 17 would have represented 76.5% of the league, just past the threshold stipulated in the NHL constitution to grant expansion franchises.
[5][page needed][11] Maple Leafs' owner Ballard also had a personal grudge in mind as well; he had never forgiven the WHA for plundering his roster back in the early 1970s.
Major pro hockey has yet to return to Cincinnati or Birmingham, though the NHL did place teams in their nearby markets of Columbus and Nashville by the late 1990s.
By comparison, when the American Football League (AFL) merged with NFL in 1970, it did so as a full partner with all of its teams intact and its records fully integrated.
Some less formal exceptions were also made, in particular for aging players: hockey legends Gordie Howe and Dave Keon were allowed to remain with the Whalers as opposed to return to the Red Wings and Maple Leafs respectively, while Bobby Hull was allowed to remain with the Jets rather than return to the Black Hawks - Hull would later be traded from the Jets to the Whalers and play on the same line as Howe and Keon during the 1979–80 season.
[13] Additionally, a good number of players on the list were either retired or of little value for each squad; years later, Oilers general manager/coach Glen Sather said that the WHA teams knew this would have happened, but went along with it anyway only because they had to participate in the NHL for their own survival.
The addition of three new NHL teams in Canada led the league to reconsider other Canadian cities it had previously rejected placing franchises in at the time.
[16] Moreover, in its search for talent, the WHA turned to the previously overlooked European market, signing players from placed like Finland and Sweden instead of being more limited within North America.
Anders Hedberg, Lars-Erik Sjöberg, and Ulf Nilsson all signed with the Jets in 1974 and thrived in North America, both in terms of the WHA and later entering the NHL.
Under the terms of the agreement made with Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo (who held onto team operations at the time), the franchise would have been reactivated if an NHL-ready arena had been built within five years.
