Toronto Blue Shirts

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The Toronto Hockey Club, known as the Torontos and the Toronto Blue Shirts were a professional National Hockey Association team that played in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

[edit] History

The National Hockey Association was formed in 1909 and before its third season in 1911 announced that it would have a franchise in Toronto, managed by Ottawa forward Bruce Ridpath. The underlying franchise was the one previously based in Montreal and known as Les Canadiens,^[1] however the Toronto team was built from scratch and did not include any players from Les Canadiens. Toronto had not previously had a arena with artificial ice that would be large enough for an NHA team, but in 1911, work began on Arena Gardens, which was planned to be the largest indoor arena in Canada. Soon after, it was announced that the president of the Toronto team was Percy Quinn, who was also president of the Dominion Lacrosse Association, a Canadian professional lacrosse league that had patterened itself after the NHA.

The Tecumseh Club in Toronto also received a NHA franchise in 1911 and the schedule for the 1911-12 season was drawn up with two Toronto teams. No games were scheduled to be played in Toronto until the end of January, when the new arena was supposed to be ready. It soon became clear that construction of Arena Gardens would not be finished in time, and in mid-December it was announced that the two Toronto teams had been dropped from the schedule and the league would play with only four teams that season.

The Blue Shirts played their first game on December 25, 1912 before 4,000 fans at Arena Gardens. The Toronto Hockey Club was owned by Quinn, managed by Ridpath, and initially coached by Tom Humphrey who was soon replaced by player-coach Jack Marshall. The team Ridpath put on the ice included Cully Wilson and future hall-of-famers Hap Holmes, Harry Cameron, Frank Foyston, and Frank Nighbor. The Blue Shirts finished the year in a tie for third place. Ridpath resigned as manager in October 1913.

In 1914, at the end of their second season, the Blue Shirts won the Stanley Cup, defeating the Montreal Canadiens in the NHA finals and the Victoria Aristocrats of the Pacific Coast Hockey League in the Cup finals.

The next season, the team fell to fourth place in the six-team NHA with a record of 8 wins and 12 losses (down from 13 wins and 7 losses). Ownership had moved to Montreal's Frank Robinson, who joined the Canadian military in 1915, leaving the Blue Shirts effectively rudderless. Sensing an opportunity, Eddie Livingstone, owner of the Toronto Shamrocks, purchased the Blue Shirts from Robinson and owned two NHA teams.

At the same time, the Pacific Coast Hockey Association—upset over the NHA's efforts to bring Cyclone Taylor back east—broke all ties with the NHA and conducted a player raid. The PCHA created a new team in Seattle and stocked it with the Blue Shirts' two leading scorers in Wilson and Foyston, their goaltender, Hap Holmes, and two other key members of the Toronto team in Jack Walker and Eddie Carpenter. The only regular Blue Shirt player to remain in Toronto was Cameron. To make up for the players lost in the raid, Livingstone transferred Shamrocks players to the Blue Shirts and allowed the Shamrock franchise to go dormant. The Blue Shirts, comprised mostly of former Shamrock players, skated to a record of 9 wins, 14 losses and 1 tie in the 1915-16 NHA season, finishing in last place in the five-team league.

Livingstone was frequently at odds with his fellow owners, particularly Sam Lichtenhein of the Montreal Wanderers. Tempers boiled over when the NHA added a second Toronto team in 1916-17, representing the 228th Battalion of the Canadian army. The 228th was forced to withdraw its team in mid-season when the unit was called overseas. That left the NHA with an odd number of teams, and the team owners—at a meeting that did not include Livingstone—decided to even-up the number of teams by suspending operations of the Blue Shirts for the rest of the season.

Before the start of the next season, the NHA owners announced that the league would not operate in the 1917-18 season. About two weeks later, all of the owners except Livingstone announced that they were creating a new league, the National Hockey League. Livingstone was not invited to participate in the new league. Arena Gardens was given a Toronto franchise in the NHL and made an arrangement with Livingstone to lease his Blue Shirts players for the inaugural 1917-18 NHL season. To Toronto fans, it would have looked like little had changed. The newspapers still called the team the Blue Shirts or the Torontos, as they always had. The team—consisting mostly of former Blue Shirt players—won the Stanley Cup in 1918. The next season, the team was known as the Toronto Arenas, which later became the Toronto St. Patricks and finally the Toronto Maple Leafs.