Wally Elmer and the Victoria Cougars:
The last non-NHL team to win Stanley Cup

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In 1925, Kingston’s Wally Elmer and the Victoria Cougars captured the Stanley Cup. However, the Cougars got a lucky break – the top team in the NHL, the Hamilton Tigers, were barred from competing after their players staged the first strike in league history.

 

The protest did not go well. Before the NHL Players Association was formed in 1967, pros were poorly paid and subject to the whims of the team managers. And NHL executives always sided with the owners.

 

The Tigers finished the 1925 regular season with the best record in the NHL. But the players refused to continue in the playoffs, demanding to be paid more after the league increased the number of games from 24 per season to 30.

 

A group of Tigers players approached team manager Percy Thompson and asked for a raise. He said no. NHL president Frank Calder warned the players that if they didn’t take part in the playoffs they would be suspended.

When they stuck to their guns, Calder declared the Montreal Canadiens league champions and fined the Tigers players $200. He told them they had to write letters of apology to keep playing the following year.

 

“According to newspaper reports at the time, the players wrote the letters but Calder announced that they weren’t ‘sorry enough,’ “ Canadian historian Craig Baird told the Original Hockey Hall of Fame.

 

In those days, the winner of the NHL played off against the Western Hockey League champions to vie for the Stanley Cup. Victoria beat Montreal in a four-game series. It was the last non-NHL team to win the trophy.

 

Following the strike, the Hamilton franchise was folded and moved to New York, where the squad was renamed the Americans.

The next year, the NHL implemented a team salary cap of $35,000. Yes, that was the maximum payroll for the entire team. The typical player earned about $1,000 per year, with stars collecting more.

 

For the city of Hamilton, the loss was huge. Over the decades since the team departed, there have been several attempts to establish an NHL franchise there. All have been blocked by the powerful Toronto Maple Leafs.

Victoria also lost its team. It was sold to a group from Detroit and were initially named the Detroit Cougars. In 1932, the team was renamed the Detroit Red Wings.

 

Wally Elmer earned a medallion for capturing the cup and it is now on display at the Original Hockey Hall of Fame. He skated for a few more years and then returned to Kingston in 1929 to coach the Queen’s varsity team.

 

To supplement his income, he opened a gas station at the corner of Princess and Division streets and later ran a dry-cleaning business.

 

Over the years, Elmer made a huge contribution to sports in Kingston. In 1938, he coached the local Junior B team to the Ontario championship. Three years later, he was behind the bench when the Kingston Combines won the Ontario Senior B title.

 

After the Second World War, he played a key role in establishing the Memorial Centre, which served as both an ice rink and a tribute to the city’s fallen soldiers. He was on the board of the International Hockey Hall of Fame.

Elmer also loved baseball, helping to create the Central Ontario Baseball Association and joined the board of the Kingston Ponies Baseball Club. He was part of a group that brought professional baseball to Kingston in 1948.

 

The community recognized his huge contribution in 1963 when it established the Wally Elmer Award for outstanding contributions to local sports in his honour. Elmer was the first recipient.

 

Commented Ebby Hare, the president of the International Hockey Hall of Fame: “It is to recognize what he has done for young people in this town. He has looked after so many youngsters in so many ways, no one will ever know.”

 

Elmer received further honours in 1968 when the Wally Elmer Arena was opened. It was notorious among the parents of youth hockey players for being so cold that they had to hold a cup of coffee to warm their hands and stomp their feet constantly to prevent their toes from freezing.

 

Wally Elmer died in 1978. Twenty years later he was inducted into the Kingston and District Sports Hall of Fame for his huge contribution to sports in the community. Not to mention winning the Stanley Cup in 1925.