Professional Hockey

Today, fans of both Alberta National Hockey League teams, the Edmonton Oilers and the Calgary Flames, worry about the economics of the game. Their concerns stem from the fact that because 24 of the League's 30 teams are based in America, the powerful U.S. dollar forces the Alberta teams to deal with budgets that are often beyond their means. They worry that the free-spending American teams will continue to inflate player salaries and the smaller market teams to the North will no longer be able to compete.

While those worries are indeed valid, they have nothing on the economic challenges faced by the Edmonton Eskimos and Calgary Tigers—Alberta's first two official professional teams. When they both joined the fledgling Western Canada Hockey League (WCHL) in 1921, the economics of hockey were even more skewed than they are today. At that time, hockey players in Canada were paid more, on average, than American baseball pros or European soccer players. Some players were rumoured to have received signing bonuses in the tens of thousands of dollars, which, pro-rated for the economy of the 1920s, was major money.

Edmonton and Calgary were also skating into a turf war between Eastern and Western pro leagues, a rivalry that was much more heated than the NHL/World Hockey Association wars of the 1970s. Since 1911, the Pacific Coast Hockey Association, later the Pacific Coast Hockey League, had rivaled the Eastern pro circuits—first the National Hockey Association and, in 1917, what became the NHL. The two leagues competed for the Stanley Cup, and were willing to throw major bucks at players in order to lure them East or West.

With the NHL gaining ground in the turf war, a third major pro league, the Western Canadian Hockey League (WCHL), was formed in 1921. Originally based in Alberta and Saskatchewan, it was doomed from the beginning. The NHL was booming, and the Eastern clubs in major centres like Toronto, Montreal (and later New York and Boston) had deep pockets. The WCHL owners tried to match their PCHL and NHL rivals tit for tat. Yes, the League featured major stars like Newsy Lalonde, Eddie Shore and Bill Cook, but they were expensive to retain. And, eventually, the spending-that-exceeded revenue curve grew too much for the League to bear. In 1926, after just five seasons, the Calgary Tigers and Edmonton Eskimos folded under financial pressures. But the hockey legacy created by these Alberta clubs lives on…

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