Sport & games

A rival league died, and the NHL kept four of its teams

In 1967 the NHL doubled overnight, adding six expansion teams to sit alongside the six long-established clubs, and kept growing through the 1970s until it reached 18 teams. Much of that growth was defensive: a rival league, the World Hockey Association, launched in 1972 and began poaching stars with eye-popping contracts, most famously luring Bobby Hull to Winnipeg for $2.75 million. Legal fights over player contracts weakened the NHL's grip on talent, and when the WHA folded in 1979 the NHL absorbed four of its teams, including Edmonton and Winnipeg, bringing it to 21 clubs, a number that held until San Jose joined in 1991. Along the way came landmark moments like Bobby Orr redefining what a defenceman could do offensively, the ferocious Broad Street Bullies era in Philadelphia, and a near-fatal blow when a Toronto owner nearly moved the St. Louis Blues to Saskatoon before a messy legal battle kept the team put.

Off the ice, the league's relationship with the wider hockey world was transformed by international competition. The 1972 Summit Series against the Soviet Union, born partly out of anger over player defections, became a national obsession in Canada and ended with a last-minute winning goal that is still replayed as a defining sports moment. It also forced North American hockey to confront how far the game had evolved elsewhere, prompting the NHL to embrace European training methods and to keep testing itself against Soviet clubs in touring exhibition series through the 1970s and 80s. As the Iron Curtain crumbled, players who once had to defect secretly, like the Stastny brothers fleeing Czechoslovakia, gave way to an open flow of Soviet and Eastern European stars into the league, permanently changing its talent pool and style of play.

The period closed out as the highest-scoring era the league has known, dominated by Wayne Gretzky and the Edmonton Oilers dynasty, which won five Stanley Cups behind Gretzky's still-unmatched single-season records for goals and points. His shocking 1988 trade to Los Angeles jolted hockey's popularity in the United States and turned him into a genuine celebrity there. Meanwhile the league kept tinkering with its structure, reviving overtime to cut down on ties, repeatedly redrawing its divisions as it grew, and modernizing its entry draft into a televised public event. By the early 1990s, with plans to nearly double its revenue and expand toward 28 franchises, the NHL was already shifting into a new, larger phase of its history.

Gretzky's 215 points in 1985-86 still stands, and in a century of NHL hockey only one other player has even reached 199: Mario Lemieux, who stopped one short.

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