YORKTON - We tend to think of National Hockey League expansion as a hugely successful endeavour these days thanks to the success of the Las Vegas Golden Knights and crowds at the first games of the Seattle Kraken.
But that is only the face of expansion now.
The NHL was not so long ago a vindictive group of owners happy to take expansion fee dollars from new owners, but being miserly in terms of giving up even a modicum of talent.
From the first expansion, that added six teams in 1967 through to Las Vegas, the NHL saddled new teams with players at the tail end of careers, or those which were never really deserving of an NHL career.
The fans were supposed to swallow losing and cheer simply because the NHL had come to town.
History however is littered with the carcasses of teams that were welcomed to the NHL, but quickly left out in the cold regarding talent, and soon gone from the landscaper of professional sports; the Atlanta Flames, Atlanta Predators, Kansas City Scouts, Colorado Rockies, and the California Seals among the lost.
The Oakland-based Seals would hope for a new arena in San Francisco, and when that heady dream died they hurriedly packed their hockey gear in 1976, and headed to Cleveland to become the Barons in the roomy Richfield Coliseum, a state-of-the-art arena seating more than 18,000 for hockey.
Unless you are an NHL fan of a certain age you might not know about the Barons. The team existed for only two seasons before being amalgamated with Minnesota, the North Stars eventually leaving town too to become Dallas.
Cleveland might have seemed primed for the NHL, a huge arena and the World Hockey Association Crusaders just leaving town, but maybe that was the omen the senior circuit should have heeded.
The Barons were lousy on the ice, winning only 47 of 160 games.
Most Clevelanders probably weren’t aware of how bad the team was. Many a night less than 5000 showed up for games.
Before season one was over the team was out of money, going hat-in-hand to the NHL to save the franchise, with players waiting for paycheques and expecting the team to fold at any moment.
It was the stuff that would make a good book.
Enter Gary Webster, a Cleveland-based author with a number of titles on his resume with McFarland & Company. His latest effort is ‘The NHL’s Mistake by the Lake: A history of the Cleveland Barons.
As you might expect this is a short-ish read. The team existed a scant 160-games and there are only so many ways to say ‘lousy’, but it is interesting to look back on just how terrible the NHL really was at handling expansion. There is a real sense the league was about as close to going the way of the woolly mammoth as you could get, just barely staying ahead of the iceberg of insolvency.
“This book chronicles the Barons’ two regrettable seasons—a case study in what happens when an ill-conceived professional sports team created in an expansion splurge is moved, in an effort to save it, to a city that doesn’t really want it,” notes the publisher page for the book.
Of course even on the worst of teams there are players of note and among that short list for the Barons was Dennis Maruk, a second round pick, (21st overall), by the Golden Seals in 1975. He had 30 goals as a rookie in California before the team moved.
As a Baron he had seasons of 28 and 36 goals, and would go on to score 50 with Washington in 1980-81, then get 60 the next season – being one of only 20 NHL players to have a 60-goal season.
“When I was in Oakland that was my first year, I was just excited to play,” Maruk said in a recent interview with this writer,” then adding “the team wasn’t very good (27 wins).”
But, the move to Ohio was still unexpected.
“It was kind of a shock to the players when it ended up the team was going to Cleveland,” said Maruk.
Maruk said the arena waiting for them was great, but it just never had any fans. He said Montreal might draw 12,000 “and the building still seemed empty,” since it could seat so many.
Maruk said he isn’t sure whether Cleveland didn’t understand what it meant to have an NHL team, or whether it was the team on the ice.
“We didn’t have the greatest team,” he said, adding the only reason they were in the games they were is because of netminder Gilles Meloche, who would end up with 270 career wins in spit of time with the woeful Seals, Barons and North Stars.
So how did Maruk stay focused amid the losses to put up some reasonable numbers?
“It was only my second and third years in the NHL,” he reminded. “I was still pretty excited to be playing in the NHL, and I wasn’t going to let that be taken away from me.”
It was a case of understanding if the Barons folded he would get a chance somewhere.
“I knew I was going to be able to continue on as a player. I knew I still wanted to continue to play,” said Maruk. “. . . We made the best of it. It was still the NHL.”
