The 1979 NHL expansion, popularly referred to as the NHL–WHA merger, was the culmination of several years of negotiations between the National Hockey League (NHL) and the World Hockey Association (WHA). The negotiations led to the dissolution of the WHA, with four of its six surviving teams – the Edmonton Oilers, New England Whalers, Quebec Nordiques, and Winnipeg Jets – entering the NHL as expansion teams for the season. The agreement officially took effect on June 22; it ended the seven-year existence of the WHA and re-established the NHL as the sole major league in North American professional ice hockey.
The two leagues had discussed the possibility of some sort of amalgamation for numerous years, despite the acrimonious relationship between the two after the WHA aggressively recruited NHL players upon the former's founding in 1971. The two sides came close to an agreement in 1977, but the proposed merger was defeated by a group of hard-line NHL owners. The NHL also initially rejected the 1979 expansion agreement by one vote earlier in March 1979; however, a massive boycott of Molson products in Canada led the Montreal Canadiens, who were owned by Molson, to reverse their position and call for a second vote on expansion. That second vote saw the agreement ratified after the Canadiens and Vancouver Canucks dropped their opposition.
Although popularly called a merger, the NHL did not and does not recognize the WHA's records or history as being any part of its own. It explicitly treated the arrival of the WHA teams not as a merger, but rather as an expansion consisting of four new franchises which happened to have identical or similar names to some of the former WHA teams. Notably, and in stark contrast to amalgamations consummated within the preceding decade in American football and basketball, the existing NHL teams were allowed to reclaim players to which they held NHL "rights" from the former WHA clubs without compensation, with the caveat being that each of the new NHL franchises were permitted to protect two goaltenders and two skaters on their WHA rosters in the process.
An expansion draft was held to help stock up the WHA refugees' NHL rosters. The expansion teams were also placed at the end of the draft order for the 1979 NHL entry draft, as opposed to typical expansion drafts in North American sports leagues, which usually place the expansion teams either at or very near the front of the draft order.
Background Since the demise of the Western Canada Hockey League in 1926, the National Hockey League (NHL) had existed as the only major professional North American ice hockey league. After dwindling from ten teams to the so-called Original Six in 1942, the NHL stabilized. In the years following World War II, the league became immensely profitable. Similar to other professional leagues of the era, the NHL enforced a reserve clause to prevent players from signing with other NHL teams after their contracts expired.
Through to the end of the 1950s, the NHL refused to consider expansion seriously. However, following speculation that the Western Hockey League would declare itself a major league, the NHL was entertaining expansion discussions by 1963, culminating four years later with the addition of six new teams for the 1967–68 NHL season; this sparked the first significant expansion period for the league, which continued up until it had tripled in size to 18 teams by 1974.
The World Hockey Association (WHA) was founded in 1971 with twelve teams, and intended to operate as a direct competitor to the NHL. It was founded by Dennis Murphy and Gary Davidson, who had previously founded the American Basketball Association (ABA) together in 1967, with the guidance of veteran hockey owner Bill Hunter to help operations out. By its inaugural season, 67 NHL players had defected to the new league. Former Chicago Black Hawks star Bobby Hull lent immediate credibility to the fledgling circuit when he signed a ten-year contract with the Winnipeg Jets for $2.7 million, the largest deal in hockey history at the time. The NHL attempted in court to block the defections, earning an injunction against the Jets that initially prevented several players, including Hull, from playing in the WHA. The new league challenged the orders, stating that the NHL's reserve clause, which tied players' rights to their NHL team for life, was essentially illegal, similar to results later found in the Oscar Robertson v. National Basketball Association case. A Philadelphia district court sided with the WHA in November 1972, ruling that the reserve clause violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, freeing all players to play in the WHA. The ruling essentially ended the NHL's monopoly on talent during this period of time.
Since hockey salaries were among the lowest in professional sports at the time, a key part of the WHA's business plan was to place franchises like the Edmonton Oilers, Winnipeg Jets, Ottawa Nationals, and Quebec Nordiques in mid-sized Canadian markets, cities the NHL had previously rejected for expansion franchises but which, the WHA thought, could sustain major professional teams in the process. The WHA also challenged the older league more directly by placing teams like the Philadelphia Blazers, New York Golden Blades, Toronto Toros, and Chicago Cougars in NHL markets. The WHA's existence prompted the NHL to expand hastily to Atlanta and the Long Island area of New York in 1972 in order to keep the rival loop out of the newly completed Omni Coliseum and Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, the latter of which would also host the New York Nets in the ABA, a planned rival to the long-standing National Basketball Association (NBA).
Merger talks Merger negotiations between the two leagues had been ongoing since shortly after it became clear within NHL circles the WHA would indeed play. In early 1973, NHL governors Bill Jennings of the New York Rangers and Ed Snider of the Philadelphia Flyers approached the WHA and offered to have all 12 of its franchises join the NHL if the WHA franchises would pay $4 million each in expansion fees. This overture went nowhere, particularly since in addition to the aforementioned franchise fees, Jennings and Snider demanded that the Raiders and Blazers pay exorbitant compensation for "invading" New York and Philadelphia, based on the indemnity the Islanders paid the Rangers when they were granted an NHL franchise.
Attempts at reconciliation were frequently blocked by Toronto's Harold Ballard, Chicago's Bill Wirtz, and Boston's Paul A. Mooney, owners or governors of the three NHL teams most affected by the WHA's player raids. By 1976, however, both leagues were struggling under the financial pressures of competing against each other both on the ice and in the courtroom. Bobby Hull had become an outspoken proponent of a merger between the two leagues, though Gordie Howe (the NHL's all-time scoring leader-turned-WHA player) and WHA president Bill MacFarland disagreed upon the merger themselves, arguing that the WHA was sustainable under an indefinite basis.
Long-time NHL President Clarence Campbell was also fiercely opposed to any union between the two leagues, saying, "They're our rivals. They were people that did their best to destroy us. Why would we salvage them now? To hell with them." Despite this animosity in mind within both leagues, some NHL teams agreed to play preseason exhibition games against WHA opponents prior to the 1974–75 season. Campbell ordered this interleague play be halted in 1975, but the following year, the NHL president (who by this time was facing both declining health and personal scandal himself) relented and interleague exhibition games resumed, although a few NHL clubs, including Montreal and Toronto, continued to boycott them entirely.
Campbell retired in 1977, and his successor, John Ziegler, was more open to unification. Under Ziegler's presidency, interleague exhibition games became more common, eventually involving every NHL team except for Los Angeles, Buffalo, Toronto, and Montreal. Merger negotiations also intensified and continued to be conducted more openly. The American teams in question were far less hostile to the idea of a merger than their Canadian counterparts. There were a number of reasons for this, but probably the most compelling was the Montreal Canadiens' dominance of the NHL during the years of the WHA's existence. The Canadiens had won five Stanley Cup championships during this time, including four in a row from 1976 through 1979. The 1976–77 Canadiens in particular are also widely considered to be the most dominant team in NHL history. Montreal owed this success in large part to its ability to better resist the WHA's efforts to lure away its players, a notable exception being J.C. Tremblay, who left the Canadiens to play for the WHA's nearby rivals, the Quebec Nordiques. While this may have been in part because Canadian Hockey Night in Canada television revenues were mostly distributed among the three Canadian teams instead of across the league, an additional factor was that star Quebecer players were long accustomed to playing in their home province, and even with the draft in effect, these players (in particular, Guy Lafleur) successfully leveraged the threat of signing with the Nordiques to ensure the Canadiens were able to acquire their NHL rights instead. Hence, adding Canadian teams and in particular either absorbing or eliminating the Nordiques outright had the potential of blunting that advantage. Also, both NHL and WHA owners realized that the Canadian markets were a vital economic base, both to the WHA and any future rival league that might take its place. Absorbing the Canadian markets would therefore preclude the possibility of the NHL having to fight off another rival league.
American support for a merger, however, was based on the assumption that all existing NHL teams would share the expansion fees equally; this did not go over well with the league's Canadian owners by comparison. The objection was not without precedent; in 1970, Montreal and Toronto had only agreed to support Vancouver's addition to the NHL after they were paid indemnities for the inclusion of the Canucks in the Hockey Night in Canada television deal. Although the three Canadian teams could not block any agreement on their own, the fact that any deal needed three-quarters support among the NHL owners meant that the Canadian teams only needed two American clubs to side with them in order to block any agreement in mind.
In June 1977, Ziegler announced that the NHL had created a committee to investigate the possibility of a merger, while Bill DeWitt, Jr., owner of the WHA's Cincinnati Stingers, stated that Ziegler had invited six WHA teams to join the NHL for the 1977–78 season if various conditions could be met. This proposal would have seen the six teams in question become full NHL members, but play in their own division with a separate schedule for the first year.
Led by Toronto's Harold Ballard, the owners voted down Ziegler's proposal in rejection. The Calgary Cowboys, who had hoped to be one of the six teams to join the NHL, subsequently folded, as did the Phoenix Roadrunners, Minnesota Fighting Saints, and San Diego Mariners. This reduced the WHA to eight teams for the 1977–78 WHA season, and left its own long-term future in doubt.
1978 revised agreement