The Expansion Era and Beyond
Although Sweeney led the league in scoring in 1963 for a third time, the party was over for the Indians. While they still had a winning record and an offense that led the league, the Rangers had moved Paille to Baltimore, and the team missed the playoffs that year in a tight divisional race. They continued to miss the playoffs for most of the rest of the Sixties.
In the meantime, Eddie Shore's oft-capricious and notoriously miserly ownership style caused increasing friction with his players, who staged wildcat strikes in 1966 and 1967. Representing them, a young lawyer named Alan Eagleson gained prominence, and went on to form the National Hockey League Players' Association (NHLPA).
In consequence, Shore sold his players and leased the franchise to the Los Angeles Kings of the NHL for the 1968 season, while retaining control of the team. The Kings renamed the franchise the Springfield Kings, and changed the team's colors from their traditional blue, white and red to a purple-and-gold scheme similar to the parent team. With Gord Labossiere, star defenseman Noel Price and goaltender Bruce Landon (a name that subsequently loomed large in Springfield hockey annals) the team had a winning record in the 1969 season, reaching the Cup finals before being swept by the Buffalo Bisons.
The following season the Kings had the benefit of a league lacking powerful teams—only Baltimore and Cleveland had winning records. The team just squeaked into the playoffs with a losing record—winning a one-game playoff with the Quebec Aces to do it—and rampaged to Springfield's fourth Calder Cup championship with a sparkling 11-1 playoff record, led by future NHL star center Butch Goring and Hockey Hall of Fame goaltender Billy Smith and sweeping a shellshocked Providence Reds squad. The 1971 Kings were, and remain, the team with the poorest regular season record ever to win the Calder Cup.
The following year Goring and Smith were gone, and the franchise spent two more years in the wilderness. But in the 1974–75 season, Eddie Shore enjoyed his final hurrah, taking full control of the team once more, changing its name midseason back to the Indians and reverting to the old blue-white-red uniforms, all to popular acclaim. With a cast of no-names, the club won its fifth Calder Cup championship (becoming only the second fourth place team ever to do so), beating the New Haven Nighthawks four games to one in the finals. An elderly Shore sold the team after the next season, ending an era inextricably linking his name to Springfield hockey.
The next fourteen years were hard ones for the once-proud franchise. Springfield went through a dizzying array of NHL affiliations, while no coach stayed longer than a single season. The revolving door did their on-ice record no good. Over that stretch, the Indians recorded only two winning seasons and only made the playoffs four times, winning but four playoff games. There were only sporadic bright spots; a scoring title from minor-league great Bruce Boudreau in 1988, quality seasons from future NHLers Charlie Simmer and Mario Lessard in 1978, and a league-leading season in goal in 1983 from Bob Janecyk.
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Famous quotes containing the words expansion and/or era:
“Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness.”
—W. Winwood Reade (1838–1875)
“...I had grown up in a world that was dominated by immature age. Not by vigorous immaturity, but by immaturity that was old and tired and prudent, that loved ritual and rubric, and was utterly wanting in curiosity about the new and the strange. Its era has passed away, and the world it made has crumbled around us. Its finest creation, a code of manners, has been ridiculed and discarded.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)