An Illustrated History of the NHL, Team by Team

Some loyal readers may have been wondering what happened to the weekly posts, which were later than normal. In what little free time there was, the author got sucked into creating the infographic he always looked for but never found: the entire history of the NHL.

Every team, one timeline

The method was simple and enormous. Take every team in the history of the NHL, drop them on a timeline, and highlight every time the name changed because of rebranding, relocation, or even pushing the words Black and hawk together.

What else the timeline records

Three details get called out specifically. The resurrection of the Ottawa Senators in 1932 after a one year hiatus. The 1978 merger of the Minnesota North Stars and the Cleveland Barons. And the triumphant return of the NHL to Minnesota and Winnipeg years after both cities lost their original squads to relocation.

How it was received, and what changed

Readers came back with corrections and requests, and two of them shaped the graphic. One noted that the Sharks should have been shown as splitting from the North Stars, since the expansion and dispersal draft of both teams when San Jose was formed sort of undid the North Stars and Barons merger. The author had thought about that connection and then forgotten it in one of those I'll get to that at the end moments, and the graphic was later updated with the link between the North Stars and the beginnings of the San Jose Sharks.

The other request was to add divisions. That one was refused, with a reason worth keeping: all the shuffling causes breaks in the continuous streams of the teams and it looks like they have died out like the Wanderers or the Maroons. Better to keep it simple.

The eras get named

What the graphic did gain, on the far left, were labels for the major phases of the league: Founding Era, Original Six Era, Expansion Era and Modern Era. A reader can now see the shape of the whole thing before reading a single name.

Credit where it is due

The post asked readers to spread the word and to credit the author if they used the graphic in any way. That is a fair request for a labour of love that took a lot of time and effort, and it is the reason the thing exists at all: nobody had made the chart, so a fan made it.