The 70's Aka The Expansion Years
In the 70's, the NHL began to change into something like an
Irish family reunion being held in Scotland. An influx of new teams and players made for an interesting experiment in civil disobedience and bleeding head wounds. More owners wanted a piece of the revenue and brought in teams to compete with the established six. While for many players the primary goal of this era was to get out alive, others were relieved to find that their raging alcoholism was considered a job skill by owners willing to do anything to make a buck. These marginal players found that playing hockey and getting into fights diverted only slightly from their primary occupation of getting into fights outside of the hockey rinks. Then one team realized that they had been looking at this all wrong and changed the priorities. Instead of trying to skillfully get the puck into the net via stick-handling and passing, teams began to beat the crap out of each other while one or two pacifists in the back moved the puck around the piles of pugilists and into the opposing team's net which made one team stop fighting so that they could congratulate each other. It was during this time, the greatest hockey-related movie of all time was released called
Slapshot. This is required viewing if you wish to talk hockey to a true Canadian. With the advent of new teams and the new-found money to be found in televised games, a separate league was created called the World Hockey Association (WHA) which was great fun for the players because now owners were fighting owners over how much to pay someone to stay out of jail. It was during this era Paul Newman starred in the greatest hockey-related film ever,
Slapshot, in case I haven't mentioned it yet.