National Hockey League (NHL)

The National Hockey League (NHL) is the world's premier professional ice hockey organization, with players drawn from all over the world. It is composed of thirty-two teams in Canada and the United States, divided evenly into two conferences (the Eastern Conference and the Western Conference) that play an 82-game season from mid-October to late April. The league also sponsors a 16-game post-season conference that culminates in mid-June with the awarding of the Stanley Cup to the winner of a best-of-seven series between the conference champions.

The league has long struggled to define itself (and its market) against the considerable presence of the Big Three American professional sports: baseball (represented by Major League Baseball, or MLB), football (National Football League, NFL), and basketball (National Basketball Association, NBA). Though hockey fans are notable for their enthusiasm, they have traditionally been most numerous in Canada and the northernmost United States. Expansion of the NHL to other areas farther south has been hampered by labor disputes. The NHL has been assertive in trying to mitigate concussions and other injuries, which are common among players of this notoriously violent sport.

History

The National Hockey League grew out of more than forty years of rough and ready Canadian hockey, often played in remote cities and rural towns during the late nineteenth century. The hockey circuit was known for its rambunctious and often violent play, as well as for its circus-like appeal as teams barnstormed across Canada. Team owners were openly fractious and combative with each other. Teams cannibalized each other for blue-chip players. Teams played under widely different rules and, though organized loosely into a handful of regional leagues, did not even have uniform seasons. In 1917, with the depletion of Canadian athletes owing to the massive war effort of World War I, savvy owners in central Canada realized the need to reorganize and codify the game. The original National Hockey League (NHL), made up of four teams (the Montreal Wanderers, the Montreal Canadiens, the Quebec Bulldogs, and the Ottawa Senators), was chartered in November 1917.

For the next two decades, the NHL maintained the game, structuring a format in which its champion would play the champion of a rival Pacific Coast league for the Stanley Cup. Although an American team was added to the NHL in 1924 (the Boston Bruins) and made the league bi-national, the NHL declined to change its name. Over the years, new teams were added, and old ones folded or changed their names. The game of hockey, and so the NHL, gained popularity in the 1930s, despite challenges from the Great Depression. By 1942, the league consisted of six teams—the Boston Bruins, the Chicago Blackhawks, the Detroit Red Wings, the New York Rangers, the Toronto Maple Leafs, and the Montreal Canadiens—and for a quarter-century those "Original Six" teams made up the NHL.

Play was fierce and scores were low as teams focused on often brutal defense. One of the era’s most enduring legends, Maurice "Rocket" Richard, who helped the Canadians win multiple Stanley Cups, was celebrated as a rare commodity: a prolific scorer. The emergence of television as a sports medium was instrumental in catapulting professional hockey. With its high-speed action, its frequent drop-the-gloves fights, and its aggressive play, hockey, although not particularly suited for radio or print, found wide appeal on television (particularly after the NHL approved treating the ice surface with white paint to improve the visual appeal). Other, later, notable stars included Gordie Howe (mainly with the Red Wings) and Bobby Orr (mainly with the Bruins).

Beginning in 1967, the NHL began to expand its number of franchises and its geographic reach, first adding teams in California, Minnesota, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis. Upstart leagues were also chartered, most notably the World Hockey Association in 1972, which merged with the NHL in 1979 and marked a decade of aggressive expansion. With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, the league enjoyed an influx of talented Soviet bloc athletes. But the success was limited, and by the early 1990s, the NHL was more than $300 million in debt. Team owners sought to impose a salary cap on teams to maintain parity and to ensure both the financial viability of smaller market teams and the long-term financial health of the league. For twenty years (1992–2012), during the long and often stormy tenure of Commissioner Gary Bettman, the League faced four separate labor disputes: a ten-day strike in 1992; a 104-day lockout that canceled half the season in 1994; the catastrophic lost season of 2004–05; and a lockout that resulted in a shortened season in 2012–13.

The NHL rebounded, however, thanks in part to changing the game itself to improve the pace and the scoring (most notably a controversial "shootout" format to resolve ties), redesigning the schedule to permit players to represent their countries in the Olympics, negotiating with regional cable providers to build a fan base, and pioneering made-for-television events such as an All Star Weekend with special techniques competitions; pre-season games played in Europe, and rivalry games played outside in the winter weather in big-market venues. The league also continued to slowly expand, adding the Columbus Blue Jackets and the Minnesota Wild as new teams for the 2000–01 season, the Vegas Golden Knights for the 2017–18 season, and the Seattle Kraken for the 2021–22 season.

Overview

For decades, hockey was perceived to be the minority enthusiasm of fanatic fans in a handful of industrial cities along the American and Canadian border who craved the raw violence of the game. And, given its makeup of players largely from Canada, Scandinavia, and Central Europe, the league struggled for more than fifty years to find its cultural niche in the United States. Only in the mid-1980s, with the rise of a cadre of flashy high-scoring superstars (most notably Wayne Gretzky of the Edmonton Oilers and Mario Lemiuex of the Pittsburgh Penguins) did the NHL begin to aggressively rebrand itself and the game to enhance its marketability.

That long-term project, however, stumbled against a series of increasingly contentious labor disputes between league executives (largely owners and their legal representatives) and the players themselves, culminating in a lockout that canceled the entire 2004–05 season. The NHL then sought to recover its image and its market by ambitious expansion efforts, testing franchises in urban markets in the west, both in Canada and the United States, and in the American South.

Of the four major American sports leagues, the NHL maintains the smallest fan base, the lowest average player salary, the smallest revenue average for team franchises, and the smallest share of the television market. The NHL is primarily responsible for maintaining rules and rule changes, reviewing applications for team relocation or new team franchises, creating schedules that balance the demands of teams that play in six different time zones, conducting the sport’s annual entry draft in June, and reviewing and defining team salary caps to maintain the viability of the game. The league also manages a variety of community outreach charity programs for teams and players in the off season and recognizes outstanding players and coaches through end-of-season awards. The NHL has, since the early 2000s, taken the lead in researching the implications of concussions on athletes. The league itself only mandated helmets in 1980, and given the speeds at which hockey is played and the inevitability of violent collisions, the league has spearheaded investigations into ways to both protect player safety and ensure the integrity of the game.

Following efforts to promote diversity within the sport, the NHL released a diversity and inclusion report in 2022 that entailed two years' worth of work across all thirty-two teams that largely focused on hiring practices within the league. Following the release of the document, ESPN reported that nearly 84 percent of all NHL employees identified as White, while 4.2 percent identified as Asian, 3.7 percent identified as Black, 3.7 percent identified as Hispanic or Latino, and 0.5 percent identified as Indigenous. (An additional 2.5 percent chose not to answer.) Meanwhile, 62 percent identified as male and 37 percent identified as female. Previously, the league founded the Executive Inclusion Council in 2020 with the intention of addressing racism and promoting inclusion throughout the sport.

Bibliography

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Wyshynski, Greg. "NHL's First Diversity and Inclusion Report Finds Workforce 84% White." ESPN, 18 Oct. 2022, www.espn.com/nhl/story/‗/id/34824468/nhl-releases-first-diversity-inclusion-report. Accessed 28 Oct. 2024.