1927-28 Pittsburgh Pirates (NHL)

I have had no offers for the hockey franchise or players and am not in the market for any. There absolutely is no dicker under way for the sale or transfer of the club.

HORACE TOWNSEND, team president, dispelling a rumor that the Pirates were about to be sold

Dissent turns to delight

PAUL CHRISTMAN
Pittsburghhockey.net

The Pirate lineup for 1927-28’s opening night was virtually unchanged from the end of the year before. Pittsburgh’s only acquisition was free agent left winger Sam Rothschild, who had played with the Montreal Maroons. He would play in only 12 games for the Pirates, earn no goals or assists, be suspended for being out of condition and breaking training rules, and end his career in another five games with the New York Americans.

The Pirates likely regretted standing pat with the previous year’s roster. The fast start of the first two Pirate seasons failed to occur in their third. Pittsburgh opened the season with a 6-0 loss at home to Detroit. “SHAKEUP LOOMS,” a Pittsburgh Press headline read the morning after. Cleghorn was reported to have left on an immediate scouting trip. On the Pirates’ first visit to Montreal in their third game, the Montreal Gazette observed that Pittsburgh lacked “the same peppery speed” of the past two years and did not have “that harmony in play” in a 4-0 loss to the Canadiens. The Gazette called the Pirate defense unsteady and noted that the team’s fast, short-passing system was gone. The Pirates were outscored by a 4-to-20 margin in their first eight matches and at 0-6-2 owned the league’s worst record. The first Pittsburgh win did not occur until December 22, when the season was over a month old.

The situation was just as bad off ice. On December 26, as the Rothschild suspension was announced, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette revealed that dissention had overtaken the club. Unnamed players did not get along. Some “deliberate attempts to maim a mate” were spotted in practice sessions. Left wing Mickey McGuire was fined and sent to the minors for not being in shape. He would not return to the NHL. The out-of-condition Rothschild, who earlier had been reported to be sidelined with appendicitis, had actually been unable to wear a uniform since December 10.

Key trades had already been made as step one in an attempt to reverse the freefall. In mid-December, Pittsburgh had loaned Langlois to the Canadiens. Langlois’s NHL career would end after the 1927-28 season. He would play the rest of the season in Montreal and be placed on waivers by the Pirates the following fall. In exchange for Langlois, the Canadiens had given the Pirates defensive help with the loan of Marty Burke. Also in December, the Pirates had acquired right wing Bert McCaffrey from Toronto in a three-way deal that sent left wing Ty Arbour from Pittsburgh to Chicago and center Eddie Rodden from Chicago to Toronto. The trades and the imposition of discipline that soon ensued were enough to spark Pittsburgh and disappoint other teams who wondered what happened to the earlier Pirates and the easy two points in the standings.

Pittsburgh followed a miserable 0-8-3 start with a remarkable 19-9-5 upsurge. At season’s end, the Press was able to write that the Pirates had accomplished “one of the greatest come-back drives in the history of professional hockey.” The first Pirates victory came three days before Christmas. It prompted condescending note from the Pittsburgh Press, which said that the “portly old gentleman with the gray whiskers evidently hadn’t forgotten Pittsburgh” by “handing them a Christmas present.” The Pirates improved slowly at first. The team went on a modest 1-1-3 run as 1927 turned into 1928. A four-game winning streak was the highlight of late January and early February. However, any Pittsburgh playoff hopes were in peril when, in late February and early March, the Pirates lost five out of six games.

Cleghorn reshuffled his lines. The Press told hopeful Pirates fans among their readership that their team still had “a mathematical chance” of making the playoffs. The Pirates then swept a home-and-home series with Chicago and defeated Boston. On March 18, the Pirates played a critical road game against the team they were chasing for a playoff spot, the Detroit Cougars. Pittsburgh emerged with a 1-0 victory on a fluke goal by John McKinnon. The win tied the Pirates and Cougars in the standings and put the Pirates at the .500 mark (a height they had not reached until then in 1927-28). Detroit had one game left to play, and Pittsburgh had two. If the two teams remained tied in the standings at season’s end, NHL President Frank Calder ruled, Detroit would go to the playoffs because the Cougars would have scored more goals throughout the season. The Press termed Calder’s ruling “ridiculous.”

The Pirates clinched at least a tie for the playoff spot with a 2-1 road win over the Maroons four nights later and returned home to face the Rangers on March 24, the final day of the season. The Pirates had a previous record of 2-8-1 versus the Rangers during their two-year series history. In Detroit, the Cougars would face Boston. The Cougars defeated Boston, 7-2, but the Pirates took the Rangers, 4-2, to nail down the final playoff position by two points. It was the climax of a six-game Pirate winning streak which Pittsburgh did not surrender more than two goals in any one game. The Pirates and their fans hoped that their newly acquired momentum would carry them during the upcoming 1928 Stanley Cup playoffs. Pittsburgh’s opponent would be the New York Rangers.

To sell or not to sell?

The playoff berth and the late-season push to achieve it could not avert more dismal attendance news. The Pirates were the only NHL team to suffer an attendance decline in 1927-28. Only 40,000 fans passed through the Duquesne Garden turnstiles during the regular season. The Toronto Globe reported that receipts for the Pirates’ first six games were less than those for the first two games the year before. Pittsburgh’s 40,000 figure ranked last among the 10 NHL teams (Ottawa was second worst, attracting 99,827 fans – over double the Pirate number). In contrast, the attendance league-leaders, the Canadiens, drew 219,000 for their 1927-28 home dates. Pittsburgh was the only NHL city to show a drop in attendance in 1927-28 over the crowd figures for 1926-27.

Reports that the Pirates were for sale had been temporarily dispelled on December 12, 1927, when Horace and Edward Townsend stated instead of selling their club, they wanted to strengthen it. The deal for McCaffrey appeared to emphasize that. And the Townsends held firm when, in early February 1928, Irwin Wener, owner of the Philadelphia Arrows, a Canadian-American Hockey League (CAHL) first-year team, reportedly tried to acquire the Pirates. On February 3, Wener told the press that he actually had purchased the Pirates. Horace Townsend, the Pirates’ president, replied, “I have had no offers for the hockey franchise or players and am not in the market for any. There absolutely is no dicker under way for the sale or transfer of the club.” It was learned that Wener held a 90-day option to buy the Pirates that expired May 1. He was considering a relocation of the franchise to Philadelphia or Cleveland, or even staying in Pittsburgh.

February was also the month when Charlie Querrie of the Toronto Star called a move of the Pirates to Philadelphia a sure bet “for the start of another campaign.” Querrie wrote that although Pittsburgh was “one of the best hockey towns in the United States” when it had an amateur team, it was a different story with the Pirates: “They have never been a success in a financial way, and it was only through the fact that the late Henry Townsend liked the game well enough to take a loss that they were able to carry on. Philadelphia should prove a valuable asset to the National League.”

In late February, the NHL announced that it “declined to sanction the transfer” of the Pirates to Philadelphia or New Haven, Connecticut. But rumors and denials were rampant until an NHL Board of Governors meeting on March 12. After the meeting, press reports said the NHL had refused to sanction the sale of the Pirates to Wener but did not elaborate and Townsend had refused to comment. But what the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called the “complicated situation” was clear one point: the Townsends would retain their franchise. Townsend said the next day that the Pirates management might be reorganized and the Duquesne Garden might see a 3,000-seat increase in its seating capacity.

More detail on the meeting and insight into the NHL mindset on its poorer franchises is found in John Chi-Kit Wong’s book, Lords of the Rinks: The Emergence of the National Hockey League 1875-1936 (University of Toronto Press, 2005). At the meeting, the NHL governors charged the league’s president, Frank Calder, “with the responsibility of handling the disposition of the Pittsburgh franchise.” Wong wrote that a summary of the meeting had no record of a discussion on any proposal to help the financially challenged Pirates or the increasingly troubled small-market Ottawa Senators. Months earlier, the Senators had proposed that they should receive a larger share of gate receipts of its road games. Ottawa contended that its history and name increased its value as a road team. But at the end of 1927, a league committee had recommended that the status quo be retained. Wong said Ottawa’s owner, Frank Ahearn, raised the gate-receipt issue again at the March 12 meeting when the proposed sale of the Pirates was brought up. Ahearn pointed out that the NHL might have to take over a financially troubled team and thereby create a bad precedent – other teams in financial trouble could expect similar treatment. It is not known whether the matter was discussed at the meeting.

However, Calder left evidence that he believed in individual responsibility. Wong cited a January 17, 1929 letter that Calder wrote to Major Frederic McLaughlin, owner of the Chicago Blackhawks in which the NHL president said that Ahearn’s proposal would not work in hockey. Calder held that “a club with a lesser constituency might sit back and lose all initiative, knowing that it would be taken care of anyhow.” If richer teams then believed they had the right to interfere in the operations of poorer ones, pro hockey’s integrity could be questioned. In this era before the NHL aimed for any sort of parity, it was a line of thought that made the gulf between the well-to-do and the not-doing-too-well particularly large.

McLaughlin was not converted to the Calder credo. His Blackhawks would lose money until the team moved into the Chicago Stadium in late 1929. As a result, he was an ally of the downtrodden Senators. In his reply to Calder, McLaughlin wrote that “a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and the present N.H.L. is beautifully designed to make weaker the weak links.” He said that Ottawa was still a good draw and a continued benefit to other NHL teams, and it shouldn’t be considered “help” to give them “what they manifestly deserve.” But Calder and a majority of the governors were not swayed by McLaughlin’s argument.

For the moment, the plan for Pittsburgh (a much weaker link than Ottawa) was to continue to play at the Duquesne Garden. Down the road, the Pirates hoped to obtain a lease to play at Pittsburgh’s proposed Town Hall convention and entertainment center. Unfortunately, there was no guarantee that a rink would be part of the Hall. Squabbles over its location and features had already beset the project from the day it was proposed. Even though the voters of Allegheny County approved a $6 million bond issue for Town Hall’s construction in June 1928, the controversy would rage on long after that.

Cleveland interests also had sought to acquire the Pirates, even as Wener had been looking to move the team to Philadelphia at the same time. In February, Frederick Wilson wrote in the Toronto Globe that a $1 million, 14,000-seat arena was ready to be built in the Ohio city. A plus for Cleveland was that Sunday hockey could be played there. It was then not allowed throughout Pennsylvania. At a monthly NHL meeting on February 13, word was that the Cleveland would receive the Pittsburgh franchise in 1928-29. The Cleveland bid remained on the table as late as May 12. On that day, the NHL announced without explanation that negotiations to move the club to Cleveland had been abandoned.

Back to playoff hockey

As the 1927-28 playoffs began, the Pirates and Rangers relocated Game 1 to New York. The March 27 game was to have been a Pirates home playoff game. The Pittsburgh Press reported that the switch was made “for some reason, known only to the league officials.” It was obvious to Seabury Lawrance of the New York Times. He wrote on March 25 that Duquesne Garden “holds only about 4,000 and the players naturally want to play where they can get the biggest gate.” He added the next day, “The play-off games not only may lead to the world’s title in this speedy sport, but a considerable percentage of the gate receipts go to the players, not only in the Stanley Cup finals, but in the preliminary playoffs. This had a considerable influence in bringing the Pirates’ home game to [Madison Square] Garden, where the seating capacity is about 18,000, as compared to about 4,000 in Pittsburgh.” The change in venue could not have given much encouragement to the Pirates, who had never defeated the Rangers at Madison Square Garden in six previous tries. But on the positive side, Pittsburgh could hope that the Pirates’ fine surge at season’s end would provide necessary momentum.

The playoff format of the day called for a two-game total-goals-scored series in this opening round. In Game 1, the Rangers ran off to a large lead in goals when they defeated the Pirates, 4-0, before 10,000 fans. The Pittsburgh Press said the Pirates were the victim of a “sudden slump.” Two nights later, the Pirates secured the only playoff victory in their history when they beat the Rangers 4-2 before 8,000 New Yorkers. Pittsburgh broke a 2-2 tie with Smith’s second goal of the game at 13:07 of the third period, and Cotton made it 4-2 Pirates at 18:24. But the Rangers took the total-goal series six goals to four. George Kirksay of the Press commented that the Pirates’ “skating and stick work left much to be desired in the series just concluded.” The New Yorkers moved on to play Boston in the semifinals. The Rangers took the Stanley Cup for the first time in these playoffs, and 44-year-old Ranger coach Lester Patrick even substituted for an injured Lorne Chabot in goal during one game of the finals. As they had done in 1926, the Pirates lost in the first round, but they could at least say they lost to the eventual Stanley Cup champion.

New possibilities for a new home

The Pirates franchise still found its way into the press in the off-season. On April 27, 1928, the Toronto Globe reported that Lester Patrick, New York Rangers manager, or his brother, Frank, might take over the Pittsburgh franchise if it were to go to Cleveland. The Patricks denied it, though they said the transfer of the Pirates to Cleveland appeared certain. But Philadelphia rumors were still active. After an NHL meeting, W.A. Hewitt wrote in the May 14 Toronto Star, “Philadelphia will replace Pittsburg in the American section.”

The NHL let the matter ride publicly until August 30, when word from league headquarters was that NHL President Calder and league owners had decided to stick with Pittsburgh. Nevertheless, the Toronto Globe reported on September 21 that the Pirates might become a second NHL team in Toronto or Boston. That proposal did not go far. And just over a month later, a former boxing champion became part of a group that would pilot the Pirates in 1928-29.

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1927-28 Pittsburgh Pirates

Skater Stats			Regular Season					Playoffs
#	NAME	POS	GP	G	A	P	PIM	GP	G	A	P	PIM
4	Hib Milks	LW	44	18	3	21	32	2	0	0	0	2
6	Harold Darragh	LW	44	13	2	15	16	2	0	1	1	0
9	Harold Cotton “C”	LW	42	9	3	12	40	2	1	1	2	2
8	Herb Drury	C	44	6	4	10	44	2	0	1	1	0
12	Bert McCaffrey	RW	35	6	3	9	14	—	—	—	—	—
5	Frank McCurry	LW	44	5	3	8	60	2	0	0	0	0
10	Tex White	RW	44	5	1	6	54	2	0	0	0	2
11	John McKinnon	D	43	3	3	6	71	2	0	0	0	4
2	Marty Burke	D	35	1	1	2	51	2	1	0	1	2
3	Rodger Smith	D	43	1	0	1	30	2	2	0	2	0
12	Ty Arbour	LW	7	0	0	0	0	—	—	—	—	—
14	Odie Cleghorn	RW	2	0	0	0	4	—	—	—	—	—
7	Mickey McGuire	LW	4	0	0	0	0	—	—	—	—	—
15	Sam Rothschild	LW	12	0	0	0	0	—	—	—	—	—
2	Charlie Langlois	D	8	0	0	0	8	—	—	—	—	—

Goalie Stats
#	NAME	GP	W	L	T	OTL	SOL	Min	GA	SO	GAA	G	A	P	PIM
1	Roy Worters Playoffs	44 2	19 1	17 1	8 0	—	— —	2740 120	76 6	11 0	2.00 3.00	0 0	0 0	0	0 0