Last Thursday, author Pat Pickens spoke with USC Annenberg’s sports and social change class on his book, “The Whalers: The Rise, Fall, and Enduring Mystique of New England’s (Second) Greatest NHL Franchise.”
Published in October 2021, the book discusses the rise, fall and legacy of the NHL’s Hartford Whalers. Originally founded in 1972 as a member of the World Hockey Association (WHA), the Whalers joined the NHL in 1979 as part of the NHL-WHA merger. They would serve as Hartford’s NHL team for nearly two decades, before moving to Raleigh, North Carolina in 1997. Today, the Whalers are known as the Carolina Hurricanes.
In Pickens’ research, the Whalers have come to serve as a case study in the existence of small-market teams in professional sports. With just over 120,000 inhabitants, Hartford ranks outside of the top 200 most populous cities in the United States. By contrast, the NHL’s current smallest market — Buffalo, New York — ranks 78th with over 275,000 inhabitants, more than double the size of Hartford.
Hartford’s small size was a major factor in the financial issues that ultimately led to the Whalers’ demise, according to Pickens. Fans of visiting hockey teams are far more likely to prefer traveling to Nashville or Las Vegas — cities that the NHL has expanded to in recent decades — than Hartford to watch their team play a game.
In addition, during the 1990s, many NHL teams moved into newer, more modern arenas, such as TD Garden in Boston (Bruins), Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C. (Capitals) and Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia (Flyers). However, as a result of their financial pitfalls, the city of Hartford could not afford to upgrade the Hartford Civic Center, where the Whalers played their home games, in line with other modern arenas. When Raleigh offered the team the new arena that Hartford could not, they decided to make the move, and the Whalers were no more.
Pickens argued that the team’s failure to win a Stanley Cup in Hartford ultimately doomed their time there. He pointed out that during the early 1990s, the New Jersey Devils were also rumored to be considering a move. After the Devils won the Stanley Cup in 1995, however, increased fan support prompted them to stay in New Jersey.
The Whalers, by contrast, only won one playoff series from the time that they joined the NHL in 1979 until they left Hartford. During their final five seasons of existence, the Whalers did not qualify for the Stanley Cup Playoffs and were therefore unable to galvanize enough local fan support to justify staying in Hartford. In Carolina, the team has had much more success, winning the Stanley Cup in 2006 and making several other deep playoff runs in recent years.
Those Whalers fans that did exist, however, faced a dilemma once the team left. Should they follow the franchise to Raleigh, a city that most Whalers fans had no connection to? Or should they pick another team to support instead? The fact that the current closest NHL team to Hartford, the Boston Bruins, were the Whalers’ biggest rival further complicated matters.
Although the Whalers left Hartford 25 years ago, their legacy still lives on to this day. In recent years, the Carolina Hurricanes have begun to host “Whalers Nights,” when the team wears throwback jerseys and uses Brass Bonanza, the Whalers’ official anthem, as its goal song.
However, according to Pickens, this has drawn a mixed reaction among former fans of the Whalers. While many of them appreciate the team paying homage to its Hartford roots, others feel as though it is further rubbing salt in the wound of having lost the team.
Having grown up in New Jersey, somewhat of a smaller market in itself, Pickens himself experienced numerous different emotions with regard to relocation. In addition to the Devils flirting with leaving during his childhood, the New Jersey Nets left for Brooklyn in 2012, depriving the region of its NBA team, and leaving the Devils as the only franchise with the New Jersey name. (Although the NFL’s New York Giants and Jets both technically play their home games in New Jersey.) Hence, beyond telling the story of the Whalers, Pickens wrote the book in order to detail both the experience of being a fan of a small market and watching that team leave your city.