Barring a last minute agreement, there will be no hockey games on December 26th on the ECHL slate. The reason? The players will be on strike. The ECHL is a development league for some players and it also is a place where players can extend their carers for a year or two before getting on with the rest of their lives. . It is two notches below the National Hockey League. The ECHL has 30 franchises in the United States and in Canada and there are loose affiliations between NHL teams and ECHL teams. There have been 776 ECHL players who played one or more games in the NHL. The ECHL has been in existence since 1988. The original name was the East Coast Hockey League and it started with five teams. The ECHL has had many teams come and go in its history. The league offers low salaries, lots of long bus trips and does not allocate much in the way of meal money. The players know that when they sign up for work.
The players want more money and the owners don’t want to part with too much in terms of salaries and per diem meal stipends. “Our members have made it very clear that they’ve had enough,” said Professional Hockey Players’ Association Executive Director Brian Ramsay. “Unfortunately, this is a league that would rather bully us than bargain.” The ECHL offered to raise the salary cap to 16.4% this season, with retroactive pay upon ratification, and increases in total player salaries in future years to pay players nearly 27% more than the current cap. The league said it has also offered larger per diems, mandatory day-off requirements and a 325-mile limit for travel between back-to-back games. The ECHL labor dispute is all about money.
The Newark-based team average attendance was the lowest in the PWHL for the 2024-25 season.
The New York Sirens hockey team exists but just how many people in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut know that the team plays out of Newark, New Jersey? The Professional Women’s Hockey League gets almost no coverage in the market. Madison Square Garden Network does show Sirens games as well as WWOR, Channel 9, New Jersey so there is some exposure but the city’s two all sports talk radio stations won’t bother with women’s sports and newspaper coverage is sparse. The PWHL has no national TV contract. The league is owned by Major League Baseball’s Los Angeles Dodgers frontman Mark Walter through The Mark Walter Group.
The PWHL has eight teams and Walter keeps the finances of the league private but he cannot be happy with the fact that a Sirens-Boston game in Newark drew just 1,884 people on December 17th. The team averaged 2,764 people per game in 13 home games in 2024-25. The Sirens drew 3,517 people to the home opener on November 29th, the lowest total of any team in the league for a home opener. The December 21st Sunday afternoon game against Toronto drew 3,517. The game was up against the Minnesota Viking-New York Giants game at the Meadowlands. There was also a New Jersey Devils game that evening.
The Sirens’ home schedule doesn’t have many prime times. A New Year’s Eve game starts at 1 in the afternoon. The day after new year’s, January 2nd is another 1 in the afternoon home game. There are no home games between January 20th and February 26th because of the Olympics break. There is another large gap in the home schedule between March 8th and April 1st.
The PWHL is in its third season of play and the Sirens franchise has been a problem since day one. The Sirens played in the league’s first game on January 1st, 2024 against Toronto. The PWHL appears to be doing better than other women’s hockey leagues. It is surviving. Boston, Montréal, Newark, New Jersey, Ottawa, St. Paul, Minnesota, Seattle, Toronto and Vancouver have franchises. The New York team has bounced around the New York City market as Bridgeport, Connecticut was its original home although the team did use the Islanders’ rink in Elmont, New York for a few home games. For year two, the team moved to Newark and uses the New Jersey Devils old practice facility in West Orange, New Jersey. That rink is a hockey hotbed.
The Bridgeport home made some sense from one standpoint. The Greenwich Stingers girls hockey team has been in existence for more than 40 years and there is a fan base in Fairfield County, Connecticut for women’s hockey. The Bridgeport rink is 20 minutes from Greenwich and closer to New Canaan and Fairfield. Julie Chu, A.J. Mleczko, and Sue Merz are from Fairfield County and were members of the United States National Team and US Women’s Olympic teams. A total of nine Connecticut trained players ended up on Olympic teams. Connecticut produces players. No New Jersey born women’s player has made it to the Olympics although Alex Carpenter spent a part of her youth on ice at New Jersey Devils practice sessions while her father Bobby was with the team before heading off to Connecticut. The NHL’s New Jersey Devils sponsor a Jersey Girls Hockey Club program for 5 to 12 year olds. So there is interest in girls youth hockey programs. But it has not translated to the PWHL in Newark. There is no indication that the PWHL will leave the New York market but if attendance continues to be low, the PWHL bosses have to look into the reasons why and whether it is worth keeping a team in Newark.
Meanwhile, the PWHL Takeover Tour has started. This tour could be a prelude to an eventual PWHL expansion as the league will test markets in Calgary, Chicago, Dallas, Halifax, Hamilton, Ontario, Washington, D.C. and Winnipeg along with a return to Denver, Detroit, Edmonton and Québec City. Each city will get two games and will be able to showcase markets and arenas to Walter. During the 2024-2025 Professional Women’s Hockey League’s Takeover Tour, the league drew large crowds in Seattle and in Vancouver and awarded those cities expansion franchises last April. Halifax, Nova Scotia was the first stop of the “tour” on December 17th. Halifax arena was sold-out with a crowd of 10,438 watching Montréal and Toronto. A December 21st matchup between Minnesota and Ottawa in Chicago drew 7,238 people, a respectful crowd in a 16,700 seat arena.
There are plans to expand to 12 teams. PWHL executive vice president of business operations Amy Scheer has confirmed that the league is planning to add teams. “We added Vancouver and Seattle this year, two teams, we’re going to expand at least 2-4 teams next year, we are in growth mode and this league is exploding,” said Scheer. But, there may be a problem in Boston and a problem in Ottawa. The Boston team doesn’t play in Boston. It plays at UMass-Lowell, which is about 30 miles north of downtown Boston. Attendance has been mediocre as the building is away from Boston and Providence, Rhode Island where there is significant population. A proposed Ottawa arena plan would see the local arena seated capacity reduced by roughly 3,000 people, to 5,500 seats and that plan the PWHL does not feel supports Ottawa’s fan base, or the financial viability of the team. The league does not want to move the franchise to the National Hockey League’s Ottawa Senators franchise building in suburban Kanata. Senators ownership is looking to build a venue in downtown Ottawa. The “Takeover Tour” could yield a number of options for the league to leave Ottawa if the arena issue is not resolved or for the Newark attendance problem if the numbers don’t pick up.
Baltimore Colts running back scores the winning touchdown in overtime in the 1958 NFL Championship game known as “The Greatest Game Ever”
The Colts-Giants NFL Championship Game was not well played but it left an indubitable on the industry.
On December 28th, 1958, the modern National Football League was born at New York’s Yankee Stadium. It was the National Football League championship game and there was an expectation that the New York Giants would easily defeat the Baltimore Colts. Both teams would pack up the equipment and the NFL would shut down until training camp in July 1959. The NFL was just a mom-and-pop part time operation. Chicago Bears owner George Halas ran a sporting goods store in the off season. Players worked jobs in the off season as did coaches. The NFL was just a step above semi-pro status.
In 1958, the National Football League was just another struggling sports entity. The league had 12 franchises with varying degrees of success.
Two events changed the league. The Baltimore Colts-Giants 1958 Championship Game and the problems the Chicago Cardinals were having at the gate. In 1958, as pro football began to stabilize economically, two Texas business men, Lamar Hunt and Bud Adams applied for expansion franchises in Dallas and Houston respectively. NFL owners said no. Both had also tried to buy the Chicago Cardinals with the idea of moving them to Texas. Both bids were turned down.
On the field, the New York Giants were becoming the glamour boys of Madison Avenue led by the handsome Frank Gifford. The Giants were the NFL champions in 1956 and finished the 1958 season in a tie with Cleveland on top of the NFL Eastern Conference. They beat the Browns 10-0 in a playoff game and faced the Baltimore Colts in the championship contest.
The Giants had Gifford, Charley Conerly, Kyle Rote and Sam Huff. Highly recognizable names. The Colts history traced back to the New York Yankees brief fling in the NFL in 1951. Unitas, Raymond Berry, Lenny Moore, Gino Marchetti and Artie Donovan were fine players but the New York media had convinced the sporting public that simply the Giants were better.
“I was very fortunate to have been part of two great games,” said Weeb Ewbank who led the Colts in 1958. “The 1958 game was supposed to have been the greatest game ever played and Super Bowl was the biggest upset.
“Our theme for that day was that we thought we were a good football team. Everybody else was supposed to be the better football team. Our theme for that game was known your football, play it well and execute it”
The Colts and Giants finished regulation tied at 17-17. The Colts tied it on a Steve Myhra field goal with just seven seconds remaining. The Colts won it in overtime– after Unitas led the team downfield capped by Alan Ameche’s one yard touchdown run with 8:15 gone in the overtime.
The on-field drama had viewers tied to their TV sets and convinced both TV executives and Lamar Hunt that football had arrived.
Hunt decided if he couldn’t join the NFL, he might as well compete with them and by 1959; the American Football League was organized with franchises in Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Denver and New York. Eventually Boston and Buffalo would join the league, but Minneapolis owner Max Winter dropped out when the NFL awarded him an expansion franchise to the Twin Cities in 1961 and eventually that franchise ended up in Oakland.
“The first organizational meeting of the AFL was in mid-August of 1959 in Chicago,” recalled Hunt. “I think there was an opportunity, the sport needed to grow. It had gone through a consolidation period and we had seen the 1958 great championship game between the Giants and Colts.
“There was great national interest in the game and there were a lot of cities frankly that were growing, not all of them had great stadium facilities. But it was beginning to happen. The public was beginning to perceive that this game had a national appeal.”
While Hunt thought the 1958 championship game was proof that the public had accepted pro football, Johnny Unitas didn’t realize that his performance along with his teammates and the Giants would change the course of pro football’s history.
“No, it was just another ballgame, that’s all it was. You never think of those things going into them. It just happened to be the one that was a championship game that happened to be in overtime, the first overtime game ever and it happened to be the one that was watched by more people than any other sporting event in the world at that time,” he said.
“It was not an outstanding football game for us. The reason why people remember is the overtime and the way we tied it up. It put football over the top and into the prominence it holds.”
Hunt’s first move after he decided to go ahead with the American Football League was to meet with Adams in Houston. Hunt felt a Dallas-Houston rivalry would be important for the new league. Hunt also noted that NFL attendance had grown from nearly two million in 1950 to more three million in 1958.
The NFL signed a TV deal with CBS in 1956 and further pushed pro football into a nation’s consciousness.
“The others came from really from names that were interested in getting the Chicago Cardinals to move to their city,” he explained. “Harry Wismer was not in that group. He was a stockholder, interestingly in two NFL teams, Detroit and Washington and I don’t know how that came about, but he came in a little later with the New York Titans.
“Ralph Wilson and Buffalo also came in October and his franchise became the seventh and then the Boston Patriots with Bill Sullivan became the eighth franchise and then we went through another consolidation and lost one team and then added the Oakland Raiders as the eighth team,” he remembered.
Sullivan was interested in bringing an NFL team to Boston and was one among the first people to conceive the idea of putting luxury boxes into a stadium in 1958.
He went to NFL Commissioner Bert Bell with architectural plans for a stadium in Norwood near the airport. The stadium had a roof and executive boxes and the idea was to have the Boston Red Sox move out of Fenway Park as a co-tenant.
The plan died when word leaked out and the Red Sox walked away from the stadium idea. Sullivan entered the AFL without a home field and jumped from stadium to stadium within the Boston area.
“In 1958, it was kind of the golden age of the NFL,” said Jack Kemp who was a backup quarterback with the New York Giants that year. “You had Conerly, Tittle, all the great quarterbacks, Gifford. When the AFL started, admittedly it was a new league and everybody thought it would fold immediately.
NFL Commissioner Bert Bell died of a heart attack suffered at Franklin Field in Philadelphia during a Stealers-Eagles game on October 11th, 1959. It was under Bell’s tenure that the Chicago Cardinals began their quest to move. The NFL had concluded the Cardinals and Bears could not share the then second biggest market in the country. The two had reached an agreement in the 1930s whereby the Bears would play all of their games north of Madison Street and the Cardinals would stay on the south side.
The Cardinals wanted out of Comiskey Park and looked to move north of Madison Street to play their games. In 1959, the Cardinals played four of their home games at Soldier Field and two in Minneapolis. The only time the Cardinals drew a large crowd for a home game in the 1950s was against the Bears.
George Halas asked Bell to come up with a decision on the Cardinals planned move north. Bell turned down the Cardinals request. Bud Adams met with the Cardinal ownership in an attempt to buy the team and move them to Houston. Adams even staged a preseason game between the Bears and Stealers to convince NFL officials that moving to Houston would be profitable. The NFL had no expansion plans and was forced to deal with Cardinals Chicago problem.
The same day that Hunt was elected AFL President, January 26th, 1960, Alvin Ray “Pete” Rozelle was elected as the NFL Commissioner as a compromise candidate on the thirty-third ballot.
Two days later, on January 28th, 1960, the National Football League awarded a franchise to Clint Murchinson to operate the Texas Rangers franchise in Dallas. The Rangers would become the Dallas Cowboys and go head-to-head with Hunt, the AFL and the Dallas Texans. Even though NFL owners were trying to throw Hunt a roadblock in his efforts to establish both the AFL and his Dallas franchise, the owners did not go out of their way to make the team very competitive. The Cowboys finished the 1960 season at 0-11-1.
CBS, which was televising NFL games, needed a solution to the Bears Cardinals two market setup. Since the teams never played head-to-head unless they played one another, and the league was blacking out home games, CBS never showed games in Chicago.
On March 13th, 1960 the Cardinals moved to St. Louis after receiving $500,000 for “improvements” at Soldier Field. Some of that money came from CBS. In truth, it wasn’t just that the NFL “allowed” the Cardinals to move to St. Louis, the league and the George Halas Chicago Bears paid the Cardinals and the Bidwill family to move. In the NFL, money talks. The Cardinals took their Chicago grandstand with them to St. Louis.
But what if there was no Lamar Hunt, no Bud Adams? No Ralph Wilson, Bill Sullivan, Barron Hilton or the rest of what the media dubbed “The Foolish Club?”
“Probably the game would have taken a different course. Certainly the league would have expanded. I would hate to hazard a guess how many teams it might be. But the AFL jerked the game of pro football forward rapidly into an era where were all of a sudden instead of there being 12 teams, in one year’s time there were 21 teams. Before 1960, you had two West Coast cities in the NFL and the rest concentrated in the Northeast. The AFL changed all of that.
Suddenly you had pro football in cities that didn’t have it before, Dallas, Denver, Houston and Buffalo.
‘That was remarkable addition and of course signaled other expansion,” said the Kansas City Chiefs owner. “There was a need for a second football league.
The argument could be made you have to fill a need. But there was a need, a natural opening for it.
“The AFL was very fortuitous. It had perfect timing.”
The two leagues merged in 1966. The NFL ascendancy can all be traced to two things, the 1958 NFL Championship Game featuring the Colts and Giants and CBS wanting the Chicago Cardinals to move out of the south side of the city.
(From the book, America’s Passion: How a Coal Miner’s Game Became the NFL in the 20th Century by Evan Weiner)
Evan Weiner’s books are available at iTunes – https://books.apple.com/us/author/evan-weiner/id595575191
A Christmas present came early for the owners of the United Soccer League’s Detroit City FC franchise It is almost full speed ahead in the construction of a 15,000 seat soccer venue and village for the ownership as the Detroit City Council is sending money and aid to help pay off the about $75 million of the construction debt of the planned facility. The Detroit City FC ownership claimed that it would pay for the venue’s construction which right now is pegged at $150 million. The plan is to knock down an old hospital to clear the land for the facility. Detroit taxpayers will be paying for the razing of the building. There are some gadgets that are available for the Detroit lawmakers to consider including capturing all sales taxes collected in the stadium footprint and sending the money to the Detroit City FC ownership to help pay for the project. The Detroit stadium plan is the latest successful effort by the USL to get municipal money for venues.
The Detroit City FC ownership needs to have a much bigger facility to be part of the USL’s upgrade. The United Soccer League plans to go “major league”. The USL has been around since 2011 and has been considered a minor league or Division II grouping by the United States Soccer Federation. The USL has 24 franchises, most of them are in smaller markets which would not necessarily be considered major league markets. The league has some franchises in big-league markets including Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Miami, New York, Oakland, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Sacramento, San Antonio and the Tampa Bay area. There is someone else keeping an eye on the Detroit soccer stadium development. Mike Repole, who bought into the United Football League, is very interested in reviving the Michigan Panthers team and the planned Detroit stadium would be perfect for his league.
