[timun]

A little bit of copy-editing:

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

1917-1918
The NHL is formed when all of the owners in the NHA ...

National Hockey Association, for the uninitiated.

• A meeting was called by the owners of the Ottawa Senators, Quebec Bulldogs, Montreal Canadians

Canadiens

and Wanderers and the Toronto Arenas, but Livingstone was somehow kept from the meeting.

Livingstone owned the Toronto NHA club, who were nicknamed the Blueshirts (which is where the nickname for the Maple Leafs comes from, and why the Leafs wear blue in the first place), so there were no representatives from Toronto at this meeting.

... with Quebec deciding to take a sabatical.

There are two 'b's in sabbatical.

The Toronto Areanas qualified for the Stanley Cup playoffs...

Only two 'a's in "Arenas". N.B. the team was retroactively nicknamed the Arenas because the Canadian Arena Company, who owned the Arena Gardens in which the Blueshirts played, were given the Toronto NHL franchise in lieu of Livingstone. Contemporarily people still just called them the Blueshirts or the "Torontos", and the official name of the team was simply "Toronto Hockey Club". Eddie Livingstone filed another lawsuit not only against the NHL, but against the Arena Company itself, and the Arena Company surrendered the franchise back to the NHL in 1918.

The NHL subsequently created a "new" franchise, gave it to the Arena Company, and they were officially called the "Toronto Arena Hockey Club". This team was officially nicknamed "Arenas". They voluntarily withdrew from and returned the franchise to the NHL after the 1918-19 season, and the franchise was subsequently sold to its GM, Charles Querrie, before the 1919-20 season. Querrie renamed the club the St. Patricks.

... and played a five game series against Vancouver of the PCHL, the Toronto's won the series in 5 games being lead by Corbett Denneny to win the Stanley Cup.

PCHA (Pacific Coast Hockey Association), and Corb Denneny is not to be confused with his HHOFer brother Cy (longtime Ottawa Senator).

Trivia
The NHL played a 22 game season

They played two half-seasons, which ended up an uneven 14 games and 8 games in length. The NHA had previously played this format, with two 10-game halves, in 1916-17. The schedule got screwed up by the folding of the Wanderers only four games into their schedule. Two previously scheduled Wanderers games were automatically forfeited to the Habs and Toronto and noted as wins in their records; the games were never actually played.

• The Habs are the first half of the season league champions and finish with a 13-9 record.
• The Arenas won the second half and finished with a 13-9 record as well, Ottawa finishes last with a 9-13 record.
• The Arenas beat the Canadians in a 2 game total goal series 10-7.

It would be more pertinent to say the Habs were first-half champions with a 10-4 record, and Toronto were second-half champions with a 5-3 record. The half-season champions were the important things, because the first-half champ played the second-half champ in the two-game total-goals series for the league championship. The "overall" standings were never counted together the way you have, and were totally irrelevant to the outcome of the league championship.

Spoiler!

Another bit of trivia to add: the NHA championship trophy was the O'Brien Trophy, named after industrialist M.J. O'Brien and his son Ambrose. Ambrose organized the NHA in the first place, and M.J. bankrolled most of the league in its early seasons; of the initial five members of the NHA—Montreal Wanderers, Haileybury Hockey Club, Renfrew Creamery Kings, Cobalt Silver Kings, and the Montreal Canadiens—four were owned by the O'Briens (Haileybury, Renfrew, Cobalt, and the Canadiens). The NHA—which was still legally incorporated—retained ownership of the O'Brien Trophy until 1921; thereafter until 1927 the NHL champion would be awarded the trophy, because the NHL champion would play the PCHA (and later, the WHL) champion for the Stanley Cup until '27. From '28 to '38 the trophy was awarded to the champion of the NHL's Canadian Division (Maple Leafs, Habs, Senators (until '34), Montreal Maroons (until '38) and the New York Americans), and from '39 to 1950 was awarded to the loser of the Stanley Cup finals.


The NHA itself was born from a disagreement between owners in the Eastern Canada Hockey Association (ECHA).

The Wanderers were sold to P.J. Doran, owner of the Jubilee Rink in Montreal, and he (obviously) wanted his team to play in his arena; previously the Wanderers shared the Montreal Arena with the Shamrocks and the Victorias. However, the Jubilee Rink only sat about 3,200 people whereas the Montreal Arena could accommodate about 4,300, and another 5,000-6,000 standing-room. The ECHA owners were pissed off because the owners all got cuts of the gate receipts for their away games, and the lower-capacity arena would thus limit their potential earnings. In much the same way as the NHA was later formed because the other owners wanted to freeze out Eddie Livingstone, the ECHA owners formed a new league called the Canadian Hockey Association (CHA) with the purpose of kicking Doran and the Wanderers out. (Ultimately Doran sold the Wanderers to Sam Lichtenhein in 1910 and the Wanderers moved back to the Montreal Arena anyway. When the Arena burned down in 1918 the Wanderers folded and the Canadiens moved... to the Jubilee Rink, where they played until 1920. )

The O'Briens wanted their clubs in the small Ontario mining towns of Haileybury, Cobalt and Renfrew to join the CHA, because the CHA was expected to be the top league in the country and they wanted to compete for the Stanley Cup. The CHA owners rebuffed the O'Briens so they went "fine then, we'll start our own league! With blackjack, and hookers!" Doran, still without a league for the Wanderers to play in after being shut out of the CHA, talked to the O'Briens and they started up the NHA.

Early in the CHA and NHA's first seasons Ottawa and the Montreal Shamrocks abandoned CHA and joined the NHA. Quebec Bulldogs moved from the CHA to the NHA in 1910, and the other CHA teams—the francophone National de Montréal and the All-Montreal Hockey Club—had no one left to play against. The CHA thus folded after only a handful of games played; Le National went back to being an exclusively amateur team in the Montreal senior leagues, and the All-Montreal folded.