The 1979–80 NHL season was the 63rd season of the National Hockey League. This season saw the addition of four teams from the disbanded World Hockey Association as expansion franchises. The Edmonton Oilers, Winnipeg Jets, New England Whalers (later renamed "Hartford Whalers" at the insistence of the Boston Bruins), and Quebec Nordiques joined the NHL, bringing the total to 21 teams. The other two WHA teams (Birmingham Bulls and Cincinnati Stingers) were paid to fold.
The New York Islanders won their first Stanley Cup, defeating the Philadelphia Flyers in six games, in the finals.
The season also marked the eighth and final season for the Flames in Atlanta before the franchise relocated to Calgary. The NHL would return to the Georgia capital in 1999 with the Thrashers, but that team would ultimately relocate away from Atlanta as well becoming the second (and current) incarnation of the Winnipeg Jets.
The collapse of the WHA also saw the much hyped super-star rookie Wayne Gretzky come to the NHL with the Edmonton Oilers. Gretzky would tie Marcel Dionne for the scoring lead with 137 points and capture the Hart Memorial Trophy as the most valuable player while Dionne took home the Art Ross Trophy as the leading scorer by virtue of having scored two more goals. Gretzky aside, many players made their debut in the NHL this season, both due to the WHA merger and to a change in the rules for the Entry Draft allowing eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds to be drafted for the first time; no fewer than seven Hall of Famers (Gretzky, Ray Bourque, Mark Messier, Mike Gartner, Michel Goulet, Mark Howe, and an undrafted Joe Mullen) debuted this season, along with numerous other perennial stars.
The big story of the regular season was the record-breaking undefeated streak compiled by the Philadelphia Flyers. After starting the season with a 5–2 win over the New York Islanders and a 9–2 loss to the Atlanta Flames, the Flyers did not lose again for nearly three months, earning at least one point in every game between a 4–3 win over Toronto on October 14, 1979, and a 4–2 win over Buffalo on January 6, 1980, earning a 35-game record of 25–0–10. This stands as the longest undefeated streak in North American professional sports history.
The 1979 expansion or NHL–WHA merger was the culmination of several years of negotiations between the NHL and the World Hockey Association (WHA). The result of the negotiations was that the WHA folded, and four of its six surviving teams - the Edmonton Oilers, New England Whalers, Quebec Nordiques, and Winnipeg Jets – entered the NHL as expansion teams prior to the start of the 1979–80 season. This ended the seven-year existence of the WHA and re-established the NHL as the sole major league in North American professional ice hockey.[1] Upon entering the NHL, the New England Whalers were renamed the Hartford Whalers at the insistence of the NHL's Boston Bruins, since their respective home cities, Hartford, Connecticut and Boston, Massachusetts, are both in the larger New England region.
Although popularly called a merger, the NHL refused to recognize the WHA's records or history as being any part of its own. It explicitly treated the arrival of the WHA teams not as a merger, but rather as an expansion consisting of four new teams which happened to have identical or similar names to these former WHA teams. Notably, and in stark contrast to amalgamations consummated within the preceding decade in American football and basketball, the existing NHL teams were allowed to reclaim players to which they held NHL "rights" from the former WHA clubs without compensation, with the caveat that each of the new NHL franchises were permitted to protect two goaltenders and two skaters on their WHA rosters.
With the league expansion from 17 to 21 teams, both the regular-season schedule and playoff format were set without regard to divisional affiliation. Under the new regular-season scheduling formula, each team played each of the other 20 teams four times in the year, twice at home and twice on the road.
The playoffs were expanded from a 12-team to a 16-team tournament, with the four division winners plus the next 12 teams with the best records in the league qualifying. The 16 qualifying teams were then seeded 1 through 16 based on regular season points, with divisional rankings ignored. Division winners also were no longer granted any byes during the first round. The top team played the 16th team in the first round, and so on. In subsequent rounds, matchups were similarly arranged, with the top remaining seed against the lowest remaining seed, and so on. The preliminary round was changed from a best-of-three format to a best-of-five format, while the other three rounds remained in a best-of-seven format.
If the five worst teams were to be in the same five-team division, the winner of this division would have qualified for the playoffs despite having the fifth worst season record. Except for that unlikely possibility, the divisional affiliations were irrelevant and had no effect on playoff qualification or seeding.[2] This regular-season-scheduling and playoff format lasted for two seasons until the divisions were realigned prior to the 1981–82 season to better reflect their geographic locations and reduce travel costs.
In August 1979, John Ziegler, the NHL president, announced that protective helmets were made mandatory for all NHL players. "The introduction of the helmet rule will be an additional safety factor", he said. The only exception were for players who signed their pro contracts prior to June 1, 1979. Those players under the exception who chose not to wear a helmet also had to sign a waiver form, if they so desired. At the time of the rule change, about 70% of NHLers were wearing helmets already.[3] The first player to wear protective headgear on a regular basis was George Owen of the Boston Bruins in the 1928–29 season. Prior to that, the only time protective headgear was worn was to temporarily protect injuries. Craig MacTavish, while playing for the St. Louis Blues, was the last helmetless player, retiring after the 1996–97 season.
For the four previous seasons, the Boston Bruins had owned first place in the Adams Division. This season saw the Buffalo Sabres dethrone them. The New York Islanders finished first overall in the NHL the previous season with 116 points, but lost in the playoffs semifinals to the upstart New York Rangers. This season saw them fall considerably in the standings as they finished fifth overall with 91 points, a full 25 points below last year's finish. On the other hand, the Philadelphia Flyers improved by 21 points from the previous season. Their 35-game undefeated streak (25–0–10) propelled them to the best record in the NHL with 116 points.
All four expansion teams finished poorly with records below .500. The Hartford Whalers fared the best with 73 points and the Winnipeg Jets tied the Colorado Rockies for last overall with 51 points. Hartford (14th overall) and Edmonton (16th overall) qualified for the playoffs, but both teams were swept 3 games to 0 in their respective first-round playoff series.
Note: GP = Games played, W = Wins, L = Losses, T = Ties, Pts = Points, GF = Goals for, GA = Goals against, PIM = Penalties in minutes
Note: Teams that qualified for the playoffs are highlighted in bold
Divisions: ADM – Adams, NRS – Norris, PTK – Patrick, SMY – Smythe
bold – The top 16 teams in the league qualified for the playoffs, regardless of division or conference.
x – Won division; y – Won Conference (and division); p – Won Presidents' Trophy (and conference and division)
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Under the new postseason format, the top 16 teams in the league made the playoffs, and were seeded 1–16, regardless of division or conference. The NHL used "re-seeding" instead of a fixed bracket playoff system: in each round, the highest remaining seed played against the lowest remaining seed, the second-highest remaining seed faced the second-lowest remaining seed, and so forth.
In the preliminary round, teams competed in a best-of-five series. In the other three rounds, teams competed in a best-of-seven series (scores in the bracket indicate the number of games won in each series).
Note: GP = Games played; G = Goals; A = Assists; Pts = Points
Source: NHL.[6]
Note: GP = Games played; Min = Minutes played; GA = Goals against; GAA = Goals against average; W = Wins; L = Losses; T = Ties; SO = Shutouts
The following is a list of players of note who played their first NHL game in 1979–80 (listed with their first team, asterisk(*) marks debut in playoffs):
Players marked with § previously started their major professional career in the World Hockey Association.
The following is a list of players of note that played their last game in the NHL in 1979–80 (listed with their last team):
Hockey Night in Canada on CBC Television televised Saturday night regular season games and Stanley Cup playoff games.
In the U.S., the league dissolved the NHL Network, the national broadcast syndication package that aired games from the 1975–76 through the 1978–79 seasons. The fledgling cable networks ESPN and UA-Columbia (later known as the USA Network) each signed agreements to broadcast slates of regular season games. The Hughes Television Network, the NHL Network's former distributor, also signed a deal to syndicate a schedule of Thursday night regular season games, selected playoff games, and the first five games of the 1980 Stanley Cup Finals. CBS then agreed to televise Game 6 of the Cup Finals. That would be the last NHL game to air on U.S. network television until NBC televised the 1990 All-Star Game, as the league remained on national cable television for the rest of the 1980s.