The Original Six and How the NHL Grew
A League Born in a Montreal Hotel
The National Hockey League was founded on November 26, 1917, at a meeting in Montreal's Windsor Hotel, and its birth had more to do with a feud than with any grand vision. Owners in the National Hockey Association, the top professional league of the day, wanted to be rid of Toronto owner Eddie Livingstone. Rather than keep fighting him, they suspended the NHA and formed a new league without him. The Montreal Canadiens, Montreal Wanderers and Ottawa Senators came over, a Toronto club later known as the Arenas filled out the schedule, and the Quebec Bulldogs held a membership but did not play in the first seasons.
The new circuit nearly shrank before it got going. On January 2, 1918, the Montreal Arena burned down, leaving both Montreal clubs homeless. The Canadiens found another rink, but the Wanderers withdrew after only a handful of games, and the NHL finished its first season with three teams. Growth came in the 1920s: the Boston Bruins became the first American member in 1924, and the New York Rangers, Chicago Black Hawks and a Detroit club that became the Red Wings arrived in 1926.
The Original Six Era, 1942 to 1967
After a Depression-era churn of franchises, the last club to fold was the Brooklyn Americans, who suspended operations in 1942 amid money troubles and the manpower drain of World War II. That left six clubs: Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Montreal, New York and Toronto. For the next 25 seasons the NHL did not add, move or lose a single team, and those six have been called the Original Six ever since, even though only Montreal and Toronto were there at the league's founding.
It was a small, intimate league. Once the schedule settled at 70 games in 1949, every club played each of the others 14 times a season, and rivalries hardened accordingly. The arenas became characters in their own right: the Montreal Forum, Maple Leaf Gardens, the Detroit Olympia, Chicago Stadium, the Boston Garden and the third Madison Square Garden on Eighth Avenue. Talent was concentrated and the stars were enormous, from Maurice "Rocket" Richard and Jean Béliveau in Montreal to Gordie Howe in Detroit and Bobby Hull in Chicago.
Montreal and Toronto dominated. The Canadiens won five consecutive Stanley Cups from 1956 to 1960, a record that still stands, and the Maple Leafs won three straight from 1962 to 1964. Toronto's victory over Montreal in the 1967 Final, the last of the era, remains the Maple Leafs' most recent championship. The Canadiens went on to collect 24 Cups in all, more than any other franchise.
1967: Doubling the League Overnight
By the mid-1960s the league feared a rival circuit would start competing for players and for the Stanley Cup itself, and owners wanted an American television contract that six teams clustered in the Northeast and Midwest could not deliver. The answer, for the 1967–68 season, was the largest single expansion any established major league had attempted: six new teams, doubling the NHL to 12.
The newcomers were the California Seals, Los Angeles Kings, Minnesota North Stars, Philadelphia Flyers, Pittsburgh Penguins and St. Louis Blues. All six went into a new West Division, with the Original Six in the East, which guaranteed an expansion team a place in the Stanley Cup Final. The Blues reached the Final in each of their first three seasons and were swept every time, the last sweep ending with Bobby Orr's famous flying overtime goal for Boston in 1970. The gap closed quickly, though. The Flyers' "Broad Street Bullies" won back-to-back Cups in 1974 and 1975, the first titles for any post-1967 team.
More clubs followed. Buffalo and Vancouver joined in 1970, the New York Islanders and Atlanta Flames in 1972, and the Kansas City Scouts and Washington Capitals in 1974, taking the league to 18 teams in seven years. The Islanders needed less than a decade to become a dynasty, winning four straight Cups from 1980 to 1983.
The WHA Challenge and the 1979 Merger
The rival the NHL had feared arrived in 1972. The World Hockey Association, founded by Gary Davidson and Dennis Murphy, who had also launched basketball's American Basketball Association, went straight after NHL talent. Its biggest coup came before its first season, when Chicago star Bobby Hull signed with the Winnipeg Jets, and the bidding wars that followed pushed player salaries sharply upward.
The WHA lasted seven seasons. After a failed vote in 1977, NHL owners approved a merger on March 22, 1979, by a 14–3 vote. Four WHA clubs joined for 1979–80 as expansion teams: the Edmonton Oilers, the New England Whalers (renamed the Hartford Whalers), the Quebec Nordiques and the Winnipeg Jets. The Oilers brought a teenage Wayne Gretzky with them and won five Stanley Cups between 1984 and 1990. They are the only one of the four that never moved: the Nordiques became the Colorado Avalanche in 1995, the Jets left for Phoenix in 1996 and the Whalers became the Carolina Hurricanes in 1997.
Hockey Heads South
The next wave of growth took the NHL to places where outdoor ice is a rarity. A turning point was the 1988 trade that sent Gretzky from Edmonton to Los Angeles, which showed that hockey could sell in warm-weather markets. The league added the San Jose Sharks in 1991, the Tampa Bay Lightning and a new Ottawa Senators in 1992, and the Florida Panthers and Mighty Ducks of Anaheim in 1993. The Nashville Predators followed in 1998, the Atlanta Thrashers in 1999, and the Columbus Blue Jackets and Minnesota Wild in 2000, bringing the total to 30.
Relocations pushed the map in the same direction. The North Stars moved to Dallas in 1993 and won the Cup there in 1999, and the Avalanche won it in their first season in Denver, 1996. Tampa Bay became the first club from the 1990s expansion wave to win a championship, in 2004, and the Hurricanes won in 2006. Atlanta, however, lost the Thrashers to Winnipeg in 2011, bringing the Jets name back to Manitoba.
Vegas, Seattle and Utah
The latest round of growth began with the Vegas Golden Knights, awarded in June 2016 as the league's 31st franchise. They reached the Stanley Cup Final in their first season, 2017–18, the first expansion team to do so since the 1967–68 Blues. They lost that series to Washington but won the Cup in 2023. The Seattle Kraken became the 32nd team and played their first game on October 12, 2021.
Utah arrived by a different route. In 2024 the Arizona Coyotes' players and hockey operations were sold to new ownership and moved to Salt Lake City, where the club spent the 2024–25 season under the placeholder name Utah Hockey Club. After several rounds of fan voting it was renamed the Utah Mammoth in May 2025.
Today's 32-Team League
The NHL now has 32 teams, 25 in the United States and seven in Canada, split into two conferences of 16. The Florida Panthers, a 1993 expansion team, won back-to-back Cups in 2024 and 2025. In June 2026 the Carolina Hurricanes, the franchise that began life as the WHA's New England Whalers, beat the Vegas Golden Knights in six games for their second title.
The Original Six still hold a special place, though. Their sweaters, rivalries and long histories anchor the sport's identity, and a Montreal–Toronto or Boston–Montreal playoff series still feels like an event. For how the modern league, its divisions and its playoffs work, see our guide to the NHL and the Stanley Cup.
