Admit it, the moment you saw this jersey you instantly had Brass Bonanza playing in your head right?
While all the talk this hockey season has been about Winnipeg getting an NHL team back and the chances of Quebec City, a market in southern Ontario, or even Seattle getting a relocated franchise in the near future, I find the lack of any possible return to Hartford a little concerning.
For a long time the Whalers had quite the following of a small but loyal fan base that saw their team grow from it’s WHA roots to an actual solid playoff contender in the mid-80′s. Not to mention heated divisional rivalries with Montreal, Boston and Quebec – strangely enough then never met their one other divisional rival Buffalo in a playoff series.
But the late 80′s and early 90′s featured some truly horrible trades as key players such as Ron Francis, Ulf Samuelsson and Ray Ferraro were traded away with very little in return. The club famously gave up very early on a young Chris Pronger and traded him to St. Louis for Brendan Shanahan who hated the trade right from the start and demanded to be traded out of Hartford a year later.
All that plus repeated failures on the ice as well as constant unreasonable season ticket demands by new owner Peter Karmanos drove fans away and in 1997 after failing to get the state of Connecticut to build him a new arena – without even having an actual or official place to move them yet – Karmanos announced that the Whalers would indeed be relocating.
