Is Marketing more important than History?

Does an NHL hockey team randomly choose which date of origins to use in order to celebrate an anniversary?

Are they sacrificing the history of their organisation by forgetting their true origins?

Is the marketing of a hockey team more important than its history?

Many questions that I’ve been asking myself lately, and in this article I will explain in details why I have these unanswered questions.

First of all, there are no standards amongst NHL teams on which original date to use when it’s time to calculate an anniversary to celebrate a team, a franchise or an NHL organisation. Some teams have been transferred; some teams come from another league. Which date should they use? Their NHL origins, their previous team’s origins or their previous league’s origins?

For example, the Montreal Canadiens come from the National Hockey Association. The Edmonton Oilers, the Quebec Nordiques, the Hartford Whalers and the Winnipeg Jets came from the World Hockey Association.

Many teams have moved from one NHL city to another. Like the Calgary Flames (Atlanta), the Colorado Avalanche (Québec), the Dallas Stars (Minnesota), the Phoenix Coyotes (Winnipeg and the Carolina Hurricanes (Hartford).

But when a team celebrated an anniversary, some teams will celebrate only the years they have played in the NHL in the current city; in 1999-00, the Calgary Flames celebrated their 20th anniversary, forgetting their Atlanta roots.

But 3 years before, in 1996-97, the Flames celebrated their 25th franchise anniversary, remembering their original roots. Talk about a nonsense.

For 2008-09, the Edmonton Oilers are celebrating their 30th anniversary, but they are not counting their 6 years in the WHA.

In 2004, the Colorado Avalanche celebrated their 10th anniversary in Denver, while completely forgetting their Quebec Nordiques history.

I believe the league should decide, not a team, if a team should celebrate or not the true origins of a franchise. As far as I know, the Colorado Avalanche still have amongst their best players that only played with the Quebec Nordiques, like Mats Sundin for example. By allowing the Colorado franchise to forget the Nordiques is an insult to the city and its fans that motivated the organisation to put together the team that won a Stanley Cup the year after.

In 2007-08, the Nashville Predators celebrated their 10th season in the NHL, while the league itself doesn’t even count the 2004-05 season in their sequence of seasons. The 2008-09 season should be the 92nd, but according to the NHL, it’s the 91st.

http://predators.nhl.com/team/app/?service=page&page=NHLPage&id=17338
http://www.nhl.com/nhl/app?articleid=368615&page=NewsPage&service=page

And of course, on October 10th, the Montreal Canadiens will be celebrating their 100th season, they are counting the lock-out season, but they are also counting the NHA seasons. I believe that it’s the first NHL team that is counting the seasons played in a previous league.

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