Seattle completes long, strange trip to National Hockey League

Know who the first U.S.-based team was to win hockey’s coveted Stanley Cup?

New York, Boston, Chicago or Detroit? Nope!

The Seattle Metropolitans captured the “Cup” over 100 years ago at the culmination of the 1916-17 season, defeating the Montreal Canadiens 3 games to 1 in a series played entirely in Seattle. And two years later the “Mets” hosted Cup play again, only to have the worldwide flu pandemic cancel play.

The National Hockey League board of governors met on Dec. 4 and awarded Seattle an expansion team that will hit the ice in 2021.

It’s been a long strange trip, as the Grateful Dead used to sing to finally have an NHL team in the U.S. part of the Pacific Northwest.

Vancouver has been in the league since 1970 and plans through the years were always to have competition for the Canucks, specifically in Seattle or maybe Portland.

That Seattle became the front-runner over Portland came as a personal surprise in many respects. Particularly because of the “Rose City’s” pedigree as a sound supporter of hockey no matter whether it was the old professional Western Hockey League Portland Buckaroos of the 1960s and 1970s, or today’s Portland Winter Hawks in the Major Junior WHL.

Thanks to the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s construction of the 18,000-seat Moda Center (formerly the Rose Garden) in 1995, the city nearly landed the bankrupt Pittsburgh Penguins. But former Pens’ star Mario Lemieux led an effort to save the team that since has become multi-time Stanley Cup champs.

While Seattle did not have the modern history of success of their Oregon rivals, nor an arena capable of landing a team, the area showed surprising fanaticism when things got serious.

The team has already secured more than 30,000 season-ticket deposits and the venerable Key Arena, known in other eras as the Seattle Center Coliseum, is currently undergoing an estimated $750 million renovation with private money. That’s essentially a knockdown to go with the early 90s nearly $100 million that took the building constructed for the 1962 World’s Fair effectively to a basketball-only venue for the Seattle Supersonics.

And we all know how that eventually turned out.

Seattle’s akin to either Charlie Brown getting fooled for the gazillionth time when kicking the football that Lucy holds, or it’s a bride left on the altar on more than one occasion when it comes to landing an NHL team.

It all started in the 1960s when the city got the 12,000-seat coliseum and it was the goal of the old pro-WHL to establish the West Coast as rival territory to the NHL, which at the time resided entirely east of the Mississippi River.

With teams in Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Vancouver, the footprint was ideal to becoming a competing league.

Effectively under-capitalized and encumbered by working relationships with the big-league teams, the idea fell apart when, in 1965, the NHL announced plans for its first western expansion that included LA and Oakland.

Seattle and Portland were passed by because neither had “major league status” at the time, the NHL contended.

A decade later, Vince Abbey, owner of the Seattle Totems, was awarded a conditional NHL franchise that would begin play in 1976. But money, then a $180,000 deposit and $6 million franchise fee, proved too steep.

The city was in the running for a team again, but the by now $50 million price tag opened the door for Ottawa and Tampa Bay which began play in the 1992-93 season.

Then came the Key Arena remodel to make the Sonics happy and ever since who would pay and where a new arena would be built stymied efforts.

Enter an obviously well-heeled group, led by billionaire David Bonderman and Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who paid a $10 million deposit, plus the renovation costs of the building — and the $650 million franchise fee.

“Right now, everything we’ve done is kind of geared toward 2020,” Seattle Hockey Partners senior adviser Dave Tippett told the Associated Press. “If we can do it in 2020 (we will), but the other thing is you don’t want to start it being a month on the road or something, either.” After over 100 years of trying to once again play for a Stanley Cup, what’s another year?

Paul Delaney can be reached at pdelaney@cheneyfreepress.com.