In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Montreal Canadiens were not only competing to be the top team in the NHL, but also the top team in their own city.
Remembering the Montreal Maroons, the team that built the legendary Forum
Welcome back to Lost Franchises, where we remember the teams that no longer exist. Today we take a look at Montreal’s other NHL team, and the first team to call the legendary Montreal Forum its home, the Montreal Maroons.
It was the 1924-25 season when the Montreal Maroons joined the league -- along with the Boston Bruins -- and were geared toward the anglophone fan base in Montreal. The Maroons filled a void that had been created when the old Montreal Wanderers, an amateur team from the early 1900s and brief entrant into the NHL for six games in 1917, folded after their arena burned down.
The Canadiens, who had long appealed to Montreal’s francophone community, initially objected to another rival NHL team playing in the city, but later dropped the appeal when the majority of the Maroons’ $15,000 expansion fee was paid to them as compensation.
At times, the Maroons were the more successful of the two teams and very nearly outlasted their more famous rivals.
The Montreal Forum: The house the Maroons built
Originally referred to as simply the Montreal Professional Hockey Club, team president James Strachan, who had previously owned the Wanderers, wanted to transfer the name over to his newest NHL club, but was never able to secure the proper rights to the name. The team initially moved on with no nickname, and it wasn’t until their second year in the league -- when they won their first of two championships -- that they were unofficially dubbed the Maroons due to the color of their sweaters.
The Maroons called the legendary Montreal Forum their home, and were actually the first tenants in the brand new arena, a full two years before the Canadiens would move in. At the time of its completion, the Canadiens were still playing their home games at the Mount Royal Arena and would do so until the 1926 season. Because of this arrangement, it was the Maroons, and not the Canadiens, that would be the first of 24 Stanley Cup championship teams (22 for the Canadiens, two for the Maroons) to call the building home.
During their 14-year existence, the Maroons qualified for the playoffs in all but three seasons, winning the Stanley Cup during the 1926 and 1935 seasons. The 1935 team was significant because they were coached by Tommy Gorman, who had led the Chicago Blackhawks to their first championship the previous year. By doing so, Gorman became the first -- and only -- coach in NHL history to win the Stanley Cup in consecutive years with different teams. For his career, Gorman would win the Stanley Cup with four different teams, having also won it with the original Ottawa Senators and later the Montreal Canadiens.
The Maroons were usually neck-and-neck with the Canadiens in terms of on-ice success, both head to head (where the Canadiens were 40-35-17 against their cross-town rivals) and relative to the rest of the league. The Canadiens won only 17 more games than the Maroons during their co-existence (which comes out to a little more than an extra win per season) and three Stanley Cups to the Maroons’ two.
But while both teams had their success on the ice and made Montreal the center of the NHL universe, they were not immune to the problems of the era.
This town’s not big enough for the two of us
Montreal hockey today
Montreal hockey today
With the Great Depression taking hold, both of Montreal’s hockey teams were struggling financially, and it eventually led to the Maroons suffering the same fate as several other teams of the era. They were forced to trade and sell off star players and were struggling to draw fans despite their success on the ice. With both teams falling under the same ownership group (the Canadiens’ and Maroons’ owners were both part of a larger group called the Canadian Arena Company) their futures were equally bleak.
With ownership deciding that Montreal could support only one team, both teams were in jeopardy. And for a brief time, it was the Canadiens that very nearly moved to Cleveland during the 1935 season until a group of local businessmen led by Ernest Savard stepped in to stop it. The Maroons, meanwhile, were clearly on their last legs as a franchise despite winning the Stanley Cup and going through the entire 1935 postseason without a loss.
That would be their last taste of success. Future Hall of Famer Hooley Smith was traded to Boston the following year, a move that started the team’s inevitable decline on the ice and financial collapse. By the end of the 1937-38 season, the Maroons suspended operations and were attempting to sell the team to owners in St. Louis, a city that had a brief NHL experience in 1934 when the Ottawa Senators moved there and were renamed the Eagles. Those St. Louis Eagles lasted only one season and were not viable financially due to travel costs.
The franchise remained suspended for another decade as team backers attempted to revive the franchise by moving it to Philadelphia, but those efforts ultimately came up short and the franchise was officially finished when the rights expired in 1947, nearly a decade after its final game.
The first goalie mask
Like some of the NHL’s other lost franchises, the Montreal Maroons have some historic significance when it comes to game-changing moments. The Pittsburgh Pirates introduced line changes, while the Seattle Metropolitans played in a league that brought the forward pass, the goalie crease and the blue line to the sport. The Maroons’ contribution was a safety measure that would take years to become a regular part of the game: the goalie mask.
While Canadiens goalie Jacques Plante is the goalie that popularized the mask and helped make it a staple of NHL equipment, he was not the first goalie to actually wear some sort of a protective mask during a game.
That honor belongs to Maroons goalie Clint Benedict, who sported a piece of protective plastic on his face for five games during the 1929-30 season after a Howie Morenz slap shot struck him in the nose. Because it obstructed his view of lower shots along the ice, he abandoned the protective gear. Later in that same season another Morenz shot hit Benedict, this time in the throat, and ultimately ended his career.
See More:
