Curse of 1940 - Popular Theories

Popular Theories

The Rangers began play in the 1926–27 season and won a division title in their first season of existence and a Stanley Cup against the Montreal Maroons in their second. They would win two more Cups in 1932–33 and 1939–40, defeating the Toronto Maple Leafs both times.

During the 1939–40 season, the mortgage on the Rangers' home arena, the third Madison Square Garden (built in 1925), was paid off. Hence, the management of the Madison Square Garden Corporation symbolically burned the mortgage in the bowl of the Cup. This led some hockey fans to believe that the Cup, which is regarded almost as a sacred object, had been "desecrated," leading the "hockey gods" to place a curse on the Rangers.

Another theory is that the supposed curse came from Red Dutton, the coach and general manager of the New York Americans, for whom he had once played. The Amerks were actually the first NHL team to play in New York City, beginning play as soon as the Garden opened for the 1925–26 season. However, their original owner, bootlegger Bill Dwyer, found the going difficult with the end of Prohibition, and the NHL took over ownership of the team in 1937. They made five playoff appearances, including a quarterfinal loss to the Rangers in 1928–29 and a quarterfinal win over the Rangers in 1937–38. However, after beating the Rangers, the Amerks fell to the eventual Stanley Cup champion Chicago Black Hawks in the 1938 semifinals, the closest they ever came to winning the Cup.

Following the 1941–42 season, many NHL players entered the armed forces to fight in World War II. This hurt the Americans more than the other teams, and so Dutton announced his team would suspend operations for the duration of the war. He was named NHL President upon the death of Frank Calder in 1943, a post he held until 1946, when he resigned and was replaced by Clarence Campbell.

Dutton had resigned the league presidency with the intention of reviving the Amerks. However, the league, with the encouragement of Garden management, reneged on a longstanding promise to allow the Amerks to return. A bitter Dutton declared that the Rangers would never win the Cup for as long as he lived. He died in 1987 at 88. At that time, the Rangers were in their 47th season without having won the Cup.

The Curse of 1940 "worked" in several ways, some of them odd. The Madison Square Garden Corporation found it could make more money when Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus came to town in the spring. This forced the Rangers, and later the National Basketball Association's New York Knicks, to use different arenas at the worst possible time –; during their respective leagues' playoffs. At the time, it was not possible to configure arenas in a way that would allow a circus and a hockey or basketball game to take place on the same day. Hence, the Rangers used Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto as their "home ice" in the 1950 Stanley Cup Finals, a move that potentially cost the Rangers that year's Stanley Cup. After the Blueshirts took a 3-2 series lead on the Wings, the NHL cited an obscure rule stating that the deciding game in a Stanley Cup Final could not be played on neutral ice. Maple Leaf Gardens was labelled "neutral" because its tenants proper were the Leafs, and Madison Square Garden was still occupied by the circus at the time. The Detroit Olympia was thus the venue for the sixth (although the Rangers were to be designated the "home" team for that match) and seventh games, both of which were won by Detroit.

Also, while Dutton was the league president, he oversaw a 1943–44 Rangers team that inherited the title the Americans left behind upon their folding of hardest-hit NHL team by World War II. The Rangers asked the NHL for permission to fold until the end of the war because of their best players' service in the armed forces overseas — a request Dutton himself had neglected to make before his own team ceased operations, as he had simply folded the Americans franchise. The Dutton-controlled NHL did not honor the Rangers' request, and so they finished well back of the other five teams that year, with career minor-league goaltender Ken McAuley giving up 310 goals in the team's 50 games, a league record for worst goals-against-average that has stood ever since. The closest any goalie since has come to equalling this record is Greg Millen, whose 4.70 GAA came from allowing 282 goals in 60 games for the Hartford Whalers forty seasons later.

League corruption and favoritism through the entire Original Six era was also a factor in the Rangers' futility. James E. Norris, the owner of the Detroit Red Wings, at one point also owned controlling stakes in both the Rangers and the Chicago Blackhawks, allowing him to stack the best players onto the Red Wings. This continued after the elder Norris's death, as his two sons, James D. Norris and Bruce Norris, continued to control the three teams. During this time, the NHL still held territorial drafts, in which teams would get first rights to players who played junior hockey within a 50-mile radius of the home stadium; this gave Toronto, Detroit and Montreal significant recruiting advantages, since the areas around those cities were far more developed in their junior hockey programs than those further from the Canadian border, including the Rangers.