Sydney Millionaires

The Maritime Professional Hockey Association was created due to a movement to eliminate professional players from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick Amateur Hockey.  Like the other amateur leagues of the time, professional players had began to mix into the maritime amateur league.  In the fall of 1911 it was decided that NSAHL would become a purely amateur organization freezing out players that had been previously been given incentives for playing for certain teams.  This left many  Maritime’s professional players without winter employment.    

The 1912 season saw the beginning of the Pacific Coast Hockey League. This league was formed and financed by Frank and Lester Patrick.

The National Hockey Association (NHA) was born in the midst of a dispute by the owners of the Eastern Canadian Hockey Association, a professional adaptation of the Association known as the Eastern Canadian Amateur Hockey Association.  In 1908 the word amateur was removed since its teams were allowed to hire professional players.  This dispute began because Montreal Wanderer franchise owner J. P. Doran was attempting to move his team from the Montreal Arena to his own rink, the Jubilee Arena.  His rink was considerably smaller than the Montreal Arena and the other owners stood to lose money in gate receipts.  They responded by disbanding the ECHA and forming the Canadian Hockey Association (CHA) without the Wanderers Franchise.  At the same time Ambrose O’Brien of Renfrew, Ontario was trying to gain admittance into the newly formed CHA for his team the Renfrew Creamery Kings (which would later became known as the Renfrew Millionaires). The Creamery Kings were the champions of the Federal League but were turned down for a Stanley Cup Challenge by the trustees since the Federal League was not considered competitive enough to mount such a challenge. A chance meeting of Jimmy Gardner of the Montreal Wanderers and Ambrose O’Brien of the Renfrew Millionaires at the Windsor Hotel in Montreal, site of the CHA founding meeting, lead to the creation of the National Hockey Association (NHA).  Both franchises had been subsequently turned down for acceptance into the CHA.

Until 1904 there were no professional hockey leagues,  hockey was played in Canada under the Victorian approach to sports emphasizing amateurism.  The first fully professional league arose in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in a place where the shadow of British amateurism wasn’t as encompassing as in the Canadian cities.  This initial league was coined the International Professional Hockey League (IPHL) and was the brain child of Joe ‘Doc’ Gibson, a dentist, who started playing amateur hockey in Ontario and eventually settled in Michigan.  ‘Doc’ Gibson's hockey history included a stint playing for an Ontario Amateur Hockey League team that was expelled from the league for paying it's players. Gibson's professional league began operation in 1904 with five teams consisting of the Calumet-Larium Miners, Canadian Soo, Houghton-Portage Lakes, Michigan Soo Indians and The Pittsburgh Pro Hockey Club.  The league drew from many Canadian players who were banned from Canadian Amateur leagues.