I realized six hours into the process of creating my awesome throwback Seattle Metropolitans T-shirt jersey that I was dripping irony on the carpet. I'm not usually a hipster, I promise, but the bespectacled, skinny-pantsed soul of my city possesses me sometimes when the subject of local hockey comes up. So give me a moment to take a swig of my PBR, and then let's talk about the good old days before the Stanley Cup made it big and hockey sold out to the mainstream.
1915-1924: Seattle Won The Stanley Cup Before It Was Cool
As proclaimed by my blog's tagline, Seattle has won the Stanley Cup more recently than Vancouver. The Vancouver Millionaires won the Cup in 1915 and the Seattle Metropolitans won in 1917, a few months before the NHL was formed. That was the Challenge Cup era, when winning teams got to defend the trophy the following year instead of having to work up through four rounds of playoffs.
The 1917 Cup series was played against the Montreal Canadiens. It was the first time the Stanley Cup was ever won by an American team. One 1917 newspaper article after the last game of the series described the Mets as blowing through the Habs' defense "like a tornado on wheels in huckleberry time" and another called the Habs' play "as clean as the bottom of a parrot's cage." (Does anyone else feel like something is somehow missing from today's hockey media?)
Because the Habs were a National Hockey Association team and the Mets were a Pacific Coast Hockey Association team, half of the games were played by NHA rules and half were played by PCHA rules. So they all had to switch back and forth each game between having six players on the ice and seven, between being allowed to substitute players in during penalties and getting power plays, and between forward passing in the neutral zone being allowed and not allowed. I gotta be honest, this sounds pretty hilarious. I would be highly entertained by playoffs hockey in which the rules changed every game. Too many men? Naw, ref, it's game 3 of the series, we get a spare!
The awesome T-shirt jersey mentioned above has a 4 on the back, which, as far as the internet seems to be able to tell, was the number worn by Frank "The Flash" Foyston. Foyston was one of three Hall-of-Famers on the 1917 Cup-winning team, and one of ten players in history to win the Stanley Cup with three different teams. The other Hall-of-Famers were Jack Walker, another of those ten players, and Hap Holmes, who is one of two players in history to win the Cup with four different teams.
In 1919, the Mets were up for the Cup again, once more against the Canadiens. The deciding game was canceled by the Seattle health department because basically everyone on the Canadiens was on their deathbed with Spanish flu. "Bad" Joe Hall actually died in a Seattle hospital four days after the game was supposed to be held. So let's just assume that if they'd played that last tiebreaker game, Seattle would've been able to beat them.
But they never won again after that. They made it to the finals once more, but were beaten by Ottawa. Attendance at PCHA games fell in the early 1920s, and in 1924 the league folded and the Seattle Metropolitans ceased to exist, along with Seattle's relevance to NHL hockey.
1924-1989: A Dry Spell To Make The 40-Year-Old Virgin Look Like Hugh Hefner
We had some other PCHL and WHL teams after that, but the NHL had laid claim to the Stanley Cup and all the associated prestige, and there were no serious attempts to bring NHL hockey to Seattle until the 1960s. In 1965, the NHL announced plans to add six expansion teams to the Original Six. Seattle was all psyched for a team, but the NHL told them not to even bother applying, because they were only going to consider cities of "major league status" and Seattle wasn't enough of a sports town to qualify.
Then the Seattle sports scene exploded in the '70s, and in 1974, the city was awarded an expansion franchise. The investment group was headed by Vince Abbey, president of the Totems, Seattle's WHL team (the now-defunct minor pro league, not the current junior league, which--just to be difficult--also includes a Seattle team called the Totems). Seattle was all set to start up a team in the 1976-77 season, along with Denver. Then Abbey started missing financial deadlines, and the NHL pulled the franchise. Foiled again.
1989-1990: Bill Ackerley, President Of The Republic Of Equatorial Douche
In December of 1989, the NHL announced that it was opening applications for expansion teams again. Two Seattle investment groups coalesced, one financed by a Microsoft exec named Chris Larson and the other headed up by Bill Ackerley, the son of the guy who owned the Sonics (Seattle's NBA team). The two groups decided to pool resources, and because Ackerley had already put in his application, they moved forward under that one.
Seattle was basically a lock for getting a franchise at this point. We had the market for it, there was Microsoft money behind the bid, there were arena plans afoot, the initial presentation went beautifully, it looked like there was no way the plan could fail. All that was left was the final presentation in December of 1990. There, in Florida, is where Ackerley went for the gold medal in Olympic long-douching. Just before the group was set to present, he met with the NHL Board in private, which he had the right to do because the application was in his name. He informed them that the Seattle group was withdrawing their application, and then he left the building, leaving the rest of the group dumbfounded.
The NHL awarded franchises to Tampa Bay and Ottawa instead. And then Ackerley rebuilt Key Arena to be entirely unsuitable for hockey, just in case there was anyone left who doubted his rightful claim to the Douchebag King throne.
Now: Okay, Fine, I'll Pretend I Care About Basketball If It Gets Us A God Damn Hockey Team
There are currently major arena talks going down between Seattle's local government and a hedge fund dude named Chris Hansen. Hansen wants the NBA back, and is willing to use the potential of an NHL tenant as leverage for his basketball plans. I'll write another post soon about the details of all this--I've been paying close attention, and showing up to council meetings in my homemade hipster hockey shirt.
Some people who oppose the arena have been saying that Seattle has too many sports teams and can't support two more, which amuses me, since hockey was the first pro sport in this city. We were here first. It's kind of... *dons thick-framed glasses* ...ironic.
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