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That Time When Being an Expansion Team Was Hard

“It’s not fair. We paid 6-million dollars to join the league and look how little the other teams have left for us.” – Capitals General Manager Milt Schmidt, during the summer before the Caps’ first season

With rumors flying about another round of NHL expansion adding up to four more teams, it’s fun to think about what players might be available for those new teams to pick in an expansion draft.

Okay, maybe “fun” isn’t the right word. Just look at the results of one two-team mock expansion draft and imagine not only those teams playing 82-game schedules, but the fifty or so non-NHLers who suddenly would be taking shifts in the League. Now imagine expansion rosters twice as ugly, and a hundred new NHLers. Not pretty.

But even those teams wouldn’t have the cards stacked against them the way the inaugural Washington Capitals did. Consider that the 1974-75 Caps team was entering the League at the tail-end of a massive four-step expansion that increased the size of the NHL from six teams to 18 in less than ten years, while the creation of the World Hockey Association meant another 14 professional teams in North America. In other words, as Mike Vogel notes, “[T]here were 32 ‘major league’ hockey teams in operation in North America. Suddenly, there were more than 600 jobs available in major league hockey where there had been just over 100 less than a decade earlier.”

And the expansion draft rules didn’t help the Caps (and their expansion brethren Kansas City) much either. Back to Vogs:

And that’s “the 16th, 18th and 20th best players from the existing clubs” after the WHA poached all of the talent they could. In his book The Legends of Landover, Glenn Dreyfuss recounts Windsor Star columnist Jim McKay describing the players available for that expansion draft as “little more than a bag of bones,” envisioning a future lede: “Washington and Kansas City met last night in hockey for the first time. Hockey lost.”

But even with the pickings slim, a team doesn’t get to 8-67-5 without shooting itself in the foot a bit. Back to Dreyfuss:

Oops. (Click here for a complete rundown of the 1974 Expansion Draft.)

It’s hardly a surprise, then, that by December, Schmidt was begging for help:

Schmidt didn’t get much help, and things got worse before they got better for the Caps. As for Schmidt, he ended up coaching the Caps for the final seven games of that abysmal first season and for the first 36 of the barely-better second campaign before being relieved of his coaching and general managing duties on December 29, 1975, with the Caps compiling an 11-95-10 record in his year-and-a-half at the helm. Here’s how Schmidt summed up his time in D.C.:

Take heart, Vegas, Seattle, Toronto and Quebec (and hockey fans) – as tough as it might be for your future NHL expansion teams entering the League, they’ll never have the cards stacked against them the way those expansion Caps did.

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