Western Canada Hockey League

The Stanley Cup was donated in 1893 to serve as a trophy to be awarded to the national champion of Canadian amateur ice hockey.

Together with the Regina Capitals and Saskatoon Sheiks the teams organized the openly professional Western Canada Hockey League (WCHL).

The Edmonton Eskimos won the regular season standings, but were upset in the playoffs by the second place Regina Capitals.

The Edmonton Eskimos won the regular season, but lost to the NHL's Ottawa Senators in the Stanley Cup finals.

This change ended up not making any difference for Montreal, as the team swept Vancouver and then Calgary for the Stanley Cup.

The Victoria Cougars, coached and managed by PCHA founder Lester Patrick, won the league championship and went on to face the Montreal Canadiens for the Stanley Cup.

A major factor weakening the league's long term prospects for success was the lack of any teams in Winnipeg, then by far the largest city in the Prairies.

However, no potential ownership group was willing to ice a team in Winnipeg without being granted the sort of territorial exclusivity that was by then common practice in North American professional sports leagues.

Such a path to success was not a viable option for the WHL because few U.S. cities west of the Mississippi River had large arenas with ice plants in the 1920s.

By the 1925–26 season, WHL teams were openly selling players to their richer NHL rivals to stay afloat.

Nevertheless, financial problems were too great to overcome, the NHL board of governors intervened by purchasing the contracts of every player in the WHL for $258,000 and the league formally disbanded.

In what was the most significant expansion of its early era, the NHL added three teams for its 1926–27 season, all of which survived the Great Depression to form half of the so-called Original Six in later years.