Bill Cook, Bun Cook, and Frank Boucher all went to New York in a series of deals at an NHL board of governors meeting
This date in 1926 was a busy one for the NHL board of governors, who had a lengthy meeting at the King Edward Hotel in Toronto and settled numerous disputes regarding rights to players.
With the rival Western Hockey League having collapsed and three new teams - Chicago, Detroit, and the New York Rangers - entering the NHL, there was a mad scramble for players who were coming east from the defunct circuit.
Most of the Victoria Cougars’ players ended up in Detroit, which kept the team’s name, becoming the Detroit Cougars. (They’re now the Red Wings, of course.) The Chicago Black Hawks similarly took over the Portland Rosebuds’ players. Members of the other four WHL teams – the Calgary Tigers, the Edmonton Eskimos, the Saskatoon Sheiks, and the Vancouver Maroons – were packaged up by league bosses Lester and Frank Patrick and sold in batches to other NHL clubs.
This led to chaos as various teams put in conflicting claims to players. These claims were resolved to mostly mutual satisfaction at the NHL meeting.
Brothers Bill and Fred “Bun” Cook, who had played for Saskatoon, had both been claimed by the Ottawa Senators and the Rangers. The Senators argued they had bought the players’ rights from the Sheiks while the Rangers countered that the Cook brothers were free agents and had been signed on that basis. It was decided that the Cooks would go to the Rangers, who would reimburse the Senators the $15,000 they had reportedly spent to buy the contracts.
The Boston Bruins had signed seven WHL players, and ultimately they agreed to sell two of them while keeping the other five. The ones they kept included future Hall of Famers Gordon “Duke” Keats, Harry Oliver, and Eddie Shore, while one of the players they said goodbye to was Vancouver's Frank Boucher, who was sent to the Rangers.
Conn Smythe, the Rangers' first manager, made these deals before being forced out of the job less than two weeks later. His replacement, Lester Patrick, put Boucher on a line at center with Bun Cook on his left wing and Bill Cook on his right, and from the start they were the team's top forward line. The trio is remembered today as the “Bread Line,” although there is no clear evidence they were ever called that while they played together; the “A Line” is a more likely nickname, but still not definitive.
Whatever they were known as, Boucher and the Cooks stayed together for 11 seasons, accounting for 535 goals and 1,067 points in regular season play. They also helped the Rangers to Stanley Cup wins in 1928 and 1933, and all three are enshrined in the Hockey Hall of Fame.
Another significant dispute was between the Montreal Canadiens and the Toronto St. Patricks over the rights to Saskatoon goalie George Hainsworth, yet another future Hall of Famer. He wound up with the Habs but later also played for the St. Pats in their later incarnation as the Maple Leafs. There were several other lesser transactions, including one that saw future NHL president Mervyn “Red” Dutton remain with the Montreal Maroons at the expense of a rival claim by Detroit.
The make-up of the NHL, now grown to 10 teams after its third expansion in as many years, was also decided at this meeting. It was confirmed that the four Canadian teams along with the New York Americans would comprise a five-team Canadian (or International) Division, and the other five teams would be in the American Division.
The playoff format would see the first-place teams in each division awarded a bye to the semifinals, where they would play the winner of total-goals series between the second- and third-place clubs. The two division winners would then meet for the Stanley Cup, which was now the league’s playoff championship trophy following the demise of the WHL, which had been the NHL’s only remaining major-pro competitor.