The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - What Happened to the NHL's Hamilton Tigers?

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

For millions of Toronto Maple Leaf fans, this season came to yet another ignominious end. However, 100 years ago, there was another NHL team in Ontario which had a worse fate. Myer Siemiatycki, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Toronto Metropolitan University joins The Agenda to share the tragic story of the Hamilton Tigers.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, On Poly people, it's John Michael McGrath. Join Steve Paikin and I for a special live taping of the On Poly podcast at the Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto on May 28th at 6.30 p.m. Visit onpoly-live.eventbrite.ca for tickets. For millions of Toronto Maple Leaf fans, this season came to yet another ignominious end with yet another early departure from the Stanley Cup playoffs. end with yet another early departure from the Stanley Cup playoffs. But, 100 years ago there was another NHL team in Ontario which, if you can imagine, had a worse fate. The Hamilton Tigers were set to participate in the playoffs when the

players decided to go on strike unless they received extra pay for those playoff games. What happened next? Well, Meyer Semioticki is here to tell us. He's professor emeritus in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Toronto Metropolitan University and has written about the fate of one of Ontario's other NHL squads. Meyer, welcome. Great to be with you, Steve.

And people who will recognize your last name, Matty, who's been on this show a lot, is your kid. That's right. So we put that on the record. There we go. Let's set the scene. The Tigers are a five-year-old NHL franchise having moved to Hamilton from Quebec City. Were they any good?

They were horrible for the first four years. And then, bingo, they hit a jackpot. They recruit some crackerjack players. And in their fifth and final season, they are the first place team in the National Hockey League. Most people don't know, Hamilton had an NHL franchise for five years. They should still have one today.

That Tiger still should be in the league. We agree on that. Right. And a number of circumstances led to basically them being transferred out of Hamilton. Hold on. Don't you get any ahead of yourself. Let's wait.

It's a heck of a story. Sheldon, bring up the wide shot, if you would, for a second, because that's the logo. This is the Hamilton Tigers logo, right? And then bring the team picture up, because this was what hockey teams looked like 100 years ago. These are the guys, right? And then bring the team picture up because this was a team, I mean this is what hockey teams looked like a hundred years ago. These are the guys right? Those are the Hamilton Tigers from back in the day. Now the NHL at the time and just I guess for people listening on podcast we should say, this is a pretty

scratchy looking outfit here. They got hockey sticks, they got sorta uniforms and a couple of guys in fedoras on the left end of that shot who I guess would be the owners and management. Now the NHL at this time, like we're 32 teams in the NHL today, it's four teams back then, right? Yeah, right. The league has just been founded and it is fledgling. It is fragile. It could be on the verge of collapse. Not only are they a four-team league, but they start as a three-team league. We like to talk about the original six. There's no original six. There's an original three. When the NHL started in 1917, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto are the three teams. Two years later, Quebec City gets a franchise.

They hang around for a year, they get sold and transferred to Hamilton where they become the Hamilton Tigers. This is in the early 1920s when hockey and really all of what we now consider the major sports, baseball, football, they are commercializing, they are professionalizing, and they are becoming a part of mass North American entertainment. Although at this stage, all Canadian teams. All Canadian teams. But there were plans to go to Boston or New York, right?

So what's going on is there's a competition among different team owners and leagues to become the preeminent league in the sport of hockey. There's a team on the Pacific Coast with professionals, many of whose players are in the Hockey Hall of Fame, great players, same there's a Prairie team league, the Western Hockey League, and there's this new fledgling National Hockey League. And then by the early 20s they realize the fans and the money is in the United States and they are all desperately strategizing to get franchises and teams in the United States and that's going to

be Hamilton's undoing. And just so people know the Stanley Cup final back then was the best team in the NHL playing the best team in the Western hockey league. Exactly right. Okay. So it was not just an NHL team. That's right. Okay.

So let's go back 100 years. It's 1925. The regular season has ended. The Hamilton Tigers are the number one team heading into the playoffs. And what happens? Okay. So what happens is that that season, 24-25, the NHL has a success.

They bring two new teams into the league. One is the second team from Montreal, the Maroons. The second is the first American team, the Boston Bruins. The Boston Bruins are the first American team. So the league goes from four teams to six teams, and they increase the length of the schedule from previously 24 games to 30 games. The players meanwhile have mostly signed multi-year contracts and they say, one could say rightly, you're now asking us to play 25% more games here. What about our salaries?"

And so by the end of the season the Hamilton Tigers players decide that because they're the first place team, they get a buy, they don't play in the semifinals, they let it be known to the league officialdom, they're not playing unless they get extra pay. The players on the other teams had all been made whole by bonuses by their team owners, not the Hamilton owner. And that owner picked the wrong group of players to try to stiff. Let's do an excerpt here from a book that was put together by the National Hockey League on the occasion of the centennial, this is some years ago, and you did a piece for this

book on the Hamilton Tigers situation and we're going to read a quote here from Shorty Green from your piece. Shorty Green, one of the big stars of those Hamilton Tigers. Here we go. Professional hockey, you write, is a money-making affair. The promoters are in the game for what they can make out of it and the players wouldn't be in the game if they didn't look at matters in the same light. Why then should we be asked to play two games merely for the sake of sweetening the league's finances? Now that's a quote from Shorty Green.

Let's bring a picture of Shorty up if we can. There he is. Who's Shorty Green, Meyer? Shorty Green is an amazing guy and if anybody out there watching or listening happens to have this 1924 hockey card all you of shorty green I'd be very interested in the conversation and so would the hockey card collectors. It's worth about $2,000. Okay, shorty green is born in Sudbury The coup that the Hamilton team engineers how they get from being worst to first is

They raid the Sudbury Wolves amateur team. Shorty Green is from Sudbury. He plays for the Wolves. Hamilton signs their four best players and brings them to Hamilton. Shorty Green in 1916 enlisted to fight in the First World War. He's in the trenches. He doesn't wait for conscription. He's committed. He has principles. He enlists. He is gassed at Passchendaele in 1917. He comes back, resumes his NHL career. So this is someone with backbone, with courage. He's not going to stand for being pushed around by, you know, the the strong arm of the NHL president Frank Calder and he makes it clear to the team itself commits that they will not play in the NHL final against

the winner of the NHL semifinals, unless they're paid extra money. Enter the villain of the piece in my eyes, Frank Calder. We got a shot at him. Sheldon, bring up the shot of Frank Calder. Longtime president of the National Hockey League. After whom two trophies are named. Yeah, that's right.

The Calder Trophy for Rookie of the Year in the NHL and the Calder Cup for, I think, American Hockey League. Supremacy. Supremacy. So, Frank Calder is a no-nonsense, his way or the highway kind of a guy. And when the Hamilton Tigers and Shorty Green announced that they're not playing unless they get this extra money, Calder counters by saying he's going to suspend all the players. He's going to fine them.

And he will disqualify the Hamilton Tigers from playing in any further in the playoffs. Shorty Green and his teammates decide they're sticking to their guns. Frank Calder says, and this is an important quote of his from the period, he says, I'm here to protect the investment of the owners and I'm going to make an example of these players. We're not going to have a league and a business operation where the players are dictating things to the owners. Now, I'll just say quickly, I don't think it's an accident that Shorty Green and three

of his teammates on a 10-player team, that picture we saw, it's only a 10-player team. Four of them come from Sudbury, and they're playing in Hamilton. Are there two more grounded, labor, working-class towns in Ontario at the beginning of this century than Sudbury and Hamilton? I don't think so.

And this is what played out. Well, let me put Frank Holder's argument to you and see what you think about it. Frank Holder's attitude was, we have signed all you players to play a particular period of time. You are contracted to play however many games we decide you need to play within that period of time. So you're not entitled to more money. How did that go over? Okay, it didn't go over well and the players didn't go for it, obviously. They did point out that because the season started earlier,

they had to report to training camp before the contractual period that Calder was invoking as their term of employment. In other words, they were called into the shop before they were supposed to be on duty. So I think his argument loses some weight there. But in a way, you could see this through a sort on to be on duty. So I think his argument loses some weight there. But you know in a way you could see this through a sort of labor history lens. Like there's

nothing unusual here. It's a group of employees and their employer and they're at a standoff about wages and benefits and working conditions. And Shorty Green towards the end of his life was interviewed by the great sports writer, Milt Donnell. Toronto Star. Toronto Star. And Shorty Green said in his later years, he would do it again tomorrow. That the owners were in it for revenue and were going to take and skim as much as they could.

And the players had to stand up for what they thought was right. Did they understand the risk they were taking? I think so. A short answer, I think so, because I think that one of the counter ultimatums that the players put forward was, if you ever want us back in this league again, we're only coming back as a team of 10. We're not going, you're not going to cannibalize us.

Like we're not going to, if the owner tries to trade some of us, thinking we're the troublemakers, that's not going to happen. We're only returning to this league as a full complement team. It speaks to the spirit, the connection, dare I say, the solidarity that they had as a team.

Well, President Calder was having none out of it. He decided the Hamilton Tigers were done. They handed the Stanley Cup. Excuse me. They handed the NHL championship to the Montreal Canadians, who went out west to play the Western Hockey League champions for the Stanley Cup and lost. Right.

Can I just jump in for a second here? That would be the last year that a non-NHL team won the Stanley Cup. Victoria beat the Montreal Canadiens to win the Stanley Cup in 1925. Three games to one. You only needed to win three back then. So the Hamilton Tigers moved to New York City and become the New York Americans. What happened to them down there? I guess they discovered New York's a fun place because they were terrible.

They had some injuries. They also discovered the temptations, I guess, of the big city. But did any of the Hamilton Tigers players who refused to play? The whole bunch. They all went to New York. They went as a team, except for two players who were married with children

who decided to stay in Hamilton. And this is interesting. And Shorty Green said, the rest of us are perfectly fine with them deciding not to come with us. They're in a different situation than us being married and having young children. So a couple of things happen. One, and this I think is a very nice touch, strike leader Shorty Green

scores the first goal ever in Madison Square Gardens. The opening game was the New York Americans against the Montreal Canadiens. New York loses, but Shorty Green scores their one and only goal. This is not, this is the old garden, not the one today. It's not the old garden. Well, in its day, it was the newly refurbished 17,000 seat artificial ice arena built in New York. This is what's going on in the 1920s.

Professional sports has become this kind of commercialized mass appeal, both sport but also in industry. And the move of the Tigers from Hamilton to New York actually begat a bit of an explosion in the United States. Tell us about that. Okay, in one sentence is if you could make it in New York I guess you could make it anywhere. They are a terrible team on the ice. They don't make the playoffs in their first season in New York but they do gangbusters at the box office.

So much so, the owner of Madison Square Gardens decides he doesn't only want to collect rent from a hockey team, he wants to own a hockey team and play it in the gardens. He thinks there's enough of a demand in New York to support two teams. Enter the New York Rangers and then the following year enter the NHL is Boston is is Chicago Detroit and Pittsburgh is also in the league so not the Penguins this is the original that's right pirates so you know to sort of recap in three years the NHL has gone from four teams all in Canada to ten teams, the majority of which are in the United States.

So part of this storyline is that Frank Calder orchestrates a distress sale of the Hamilton Tigers to New York to win the Stanley Cup. The NHL headquarters moved from Montreal to New York, and each president of the league now seems to be an American. It's been a takeover. Well, I mean you have to say on the one hand it was terrible for Hamilton because Hamilton lost its NHL team, but in terms of the future explosive growth of the sport, you can actually kind of draw a straight line from where we are today to 100 years ago. No question. And the other line that I draw from that, that's a really good point Steve, the other

line I draw is the NHL owes Hamilton. There are reparations to be paid. Hamilton sold its team for $75,000, $19.25. I looked this up online, the equivalent of about a million and a half dollars today. The average NHL team, the average NHL team today is valued at $2 billion. The NHL on a 100th anniversary like this should reflect back and say, you know, we kind of, number one, there was an injustice here.

The players had a legitimate issue and cause. We should have handled their situation differently. And in our rush to get a team into New York, we sacrificed, we sold off the Hamilton franchise. The NHL owes Hamilton, whether the repayment is in the form of put another NHL team in Hamilton, whether it's make a commitment to support amateur, kids, neighborhood hockey in Hamilton, all of those I think are up for grabs. And I've got a message for the NHLPA, the NHL professional players association.

The Hamilton players did this without having a union. There was no union. The unionization of hockey players would wait another 40, 50 years. The NHLPA should establish a Shorty Green annual award to the person who has made the greatest contribution to the well-being of hockey players. I love those ideas. Thanks for putting them on the record. That's great. There's a lot of threads from this, and especially as we're in a moment where also we're in, I gather, we're in a difficult period of Canadian-American economic relations. You've heard something about that. Yeah, you know there are some threads to think about from all of this.

A lot of stuff to fix. Meyer Semioticki, professor emeritus, Toronto Metropolitan University, and a guy who knows his hockey. Well done on the history of the Hamilton Tigers. Thanks, Meyer. Great to be here with you, Steve.