WHEN DID NHL 22 COME OUT PROFESSIONAL
Professional teams popped up in the most unlikely places, such as Cobalt and Haileybury, Ontario, where wealthy mine owners purchased the best players that money could buy. In fall 1907, Tom Phillips, star of the Kenora Thistles, signed with Ottawa for $1,800. Teams began openly competing for players. (The league disbanded in 1907.) It also contributed to the 1906 decision by the Eastern Canada Amateur Hockey Association to officially allow professional players in the league. The success of the club also led to formation of the International Hockey League in 1904, with three teams in Michigan, another in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and one in Sault Ste.
The Portage Lakes club was so good that other teams in Canada and the United States had to follow its lead and pay players to compete, regardless of concerns about professionalism in sports. In 1903, “Doc” Gibson decided to pay for talent, and so team management hired the best players from Canada. Gibson, a Canadian who had relocated to Houghton, Michigan. The first openly professional hockey team was the Portage Lakes hockey club, founded in 1900 by dentist J.L. Professional hockey was barely a few years old but it had already created a familiar landscape: quarrels among owners, soaring salaries, lawsuits and injunctions, salary caps, bankrupt franchises - all the slings and arrows the market is heir to. Livingstone was "always arguing,” Ottawa manager and co-owner Tommy Gorman said, "Without him we can get down to the business of making money.” So they met without him and made a new league (which officially came into existence on 26 November 1917). Five of the six owners of the old National Hockey Association had finally gotten tired of the stubborn and confrontational owner of the Toronto Blueshirts, Eddie Livingstone. George Kennedy, owner of the Montreal Canadiens, was more forthcoming: "It's like our old league except that we haven't invited Eddie Livingstone to be part of it," he told Ferguson.
Ferguson hollered after him, "Hey Frank, what happened?" "Nothing much," replied Calder. The first man to emerge from behind closed doors of the meeting was Frank Calder, who would become president of the new league. Elmer Ferguson was the lone reporter sitting waiting for news. On 22 November, a group of team owners from the struggling National Hockey Association (NHA) gathered for a meeting in the Windsor Hotel in Montréal. When the National Hockey League formed in late 1917, few could imagine the importance it would have in the fabric of Canadian life.
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