History of Professional Hockey

The beginning of Professional Hockey was an amateur affair until 1904, when the first professional hockey league was created in the United States and known as the International Pro Hockey League. The league was based in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and it folded in 1907. Three years later, the National Hockey Association (NHA) was started. And shortly after that came the Pacific Coast League (PCL). In 1914, a transcontinental championship series was arranged between the two leagues, with the winner getting the coveted Stanley Cup. The World War I threw the entire hockey establishment into disarray as it took all the hockey players as soldiers for the war so the NHA decided to suspend operations. 

The first Stanley Cup champions were the Montreal Amateur 
Athletic Association, but after the war, the people who operated the game of hockey decided to start a whole new professional organization that would be known as the National Hockey League (NHL). At its inception, the NHL boasted five franchises- the Montreal Canadiens, the Montreal Wanderers, the Ottawa Senators, the Quebec Bulldogs, and the Toronto Arenas. The league's first game was held Dec. 19, 1917. The clubs played a 22-game schedule and, picking up on a rule change instituted by the old NHA, dropped the rover and employed only six players on a side. Toronto finished that first season on top, and in March 1918 met the Pacific Coast League champion Vancouver Millionaires for the Stanley Cup. Toronto won, three games to two. Eventually the PCL folded, and at the start of the 1926 season, the NHL, which at that point had ten teams, divided into two divisions and took control of the Stanley Cup.
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