Happy Start in Expansion Hockey Is Fantasyland

These are happy days in the life of the California Mighty Ducks/Screaming Pucks/Golden Buck$/(your name faxed here).

Maybe the happiest they’ll ever have.

Where do we get tickets? What are we going to call them? Who’s going to coach them? When can we see Gretzky? When can we get Gretzky? What’s a blue line? What’s a third line? What’s a red line? Is there a green line?

Our concerns are simple now.

As opposed to how they will sound this time next year:

“The red light’s flashing again. Did we draft a goalie or a Highway Patrolman?”

“You say the Washington Capitals won one road game their first season? Really? That many?”

“I thought only football teams lost games by scores of 17-3.”

Expansion hockey is the ugliest phrase in the sporting vocabulary, the athletic equivalent of an oil spill. It is dirty, messy, frightening to watch, costly to clean up--and hazardous to wildlife.

Who can party when your team’s in the middle of a 17-game winless streak?

Expansion hockey is so much worse than, say, expansion football because hockey expands so damn much. Since 1970, the National Football League has added but two teams--the Seattle Seahawks and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers--and the league continues to apologize for it. During the same span, major league baseball has added four teams, including the just-born Colorado Rockies and Florida Marlins.

But the National Hockey League has more than doubled since 1970--going from 12 teams then to 26 by the 1993-94 season, assuming Anaheim and Miami are ready to lace up the skates. Go back to 1967, 25 years ago, and the league has more than quadrupled in size--from six to 26. In the 1990s alone, NHL membership has grown by nearly 25%.

But the NHL talent pool remains at early 1970s levels. “There isn’t enough talent for 12 teams,” one general manager grumbled in the wake of the latest eruption.

Ottawa, one of this year’s new teams, is led in scoring by Norm Maciver, a journeyman defenseman, with 23 points. That’s 56 behind Mario Lemieux.

Tampa Bay, the league’s other rookie team, couldn’t find enough men to fill out its minor league goaltending corps, so it had to hire a woman.

There isn’t enough talent to go around because hockey talent is so difficult to cultivate. Throw hard, and you can be a pitcher. Leap high, and you’re a rebounder. But hockey requires a bizarre amalgam of seemingly unrelated skills. It is the weirdest sport this side of the biathlon--an unholy union of speedskating, pro wrestling, offensive line blocking and extremely intense croquet.

It takes years to master, which must be why the New York Rangers haven’t won the Stanley Cup since 1940.

The two best expansion hockey teams of all time, the 1967-68 Philadelphia Flyers and Los Angeles Kings, won 31 of 74 games, but those records come with asterisks attached. That year, the NHL introduced six expansion teams--also giving birth to the Minnesota North Stars, Pittsburgh Penguins, Oakland Seals and St. Louis Blues--and put them all in the same division.

No wonder the Flyers and the Kings won 31 games. They both had five expansion teams on their schedules.

Excluding that skewered season of mega-expansion, and the NHL-WHA merger of 1979, the best first-year record for an NHL expansion team belongs to the 1972-73 Atlanta Flames: 25-38-15. Twenty-five victories. A comparable finish for a baseball expansion team would be 50-112.

The worst expansion team?

Well, before 1992, the distinction belonged to the 1974-75 Washington Capitals. This was the crew that won one road game, seven home games and finished an incredible 8-67-5 . The Capitals, led by the aptly named Ron Low in goal, lost 17 consecutive games (an NHL record), lost 11 consecutive games at home (an NHL record) and allowed 446 goals, or 5.6 a game (an NHL record).

We repeat: 8-67-5.

A comparable baseball finish would be 16-146--or 25 games behind the worst baseball team ever, the 40-120 New York Mets of 1962.

Now, Orange County, cast your eyes toward Ottawa, currently the NHL’s team to beat. Everybody has been doing it--26 times in 32 tries. Throw in three inexplicable ties and the Senators stand, wobbling, at 3-26-3, 10 games shy of the season’s halfway point.

This places Ottawa on a pace for 7.8 victories.

This places Washington’s record in serious jeopardy.

Then, next October, Anaheim and Miami might take their shots at it. And, since they’ll be drafting Ottawa’s and Tampa Bay’s discards, the force most definitely will be with them.

Unless . . .

Michael Eisner and Wayne Huizenga, two powerful-enough guys, throw around their considerable weight and lobby for realignment, a la 1967. They need to create a new division and throw all the newcomers into it--Anaheim, Miami, Ottawa, Tampa Bay and San Jose. Need one more? How about Hartford, now in its 14th year of first-year expansion.

They could call it the Joly Division, named after Greg Joly, the first player chosen by Washington in the 1974 entry draft. Joly played in 44 games for the Capitals, scored one goal and had a plus-minus rating of minus 68.

He was, they tell me, an expansion hockey player’s expansion hockey player.

Do that, and Anaheim stands a chance of having a Joly good time in its first few seasons.

Otherwise, the only thing we’ll have on tap for late April and May, ’94 and ‘95, is Angel baseball.

And nobody around here wants that.