2017 NHL Expansion
The 2017 NHL Expansion was the culmination of several years of negotiations between the National Hockey League (NHL) and the revived National Hockey Association (NHA) that resulted in the NHA and its eight surviving franchises folding in return for the owners of six of those teams (the Saskatoon Blades, Portland Lumberjacks, Atlanta Bulldogs, Kentucky Cowboys, Alabama Bulls, and Seattle Krakens) being granted expansion franchises that commenced play in the NHL for the 2017–18 season. The agreement officially took effect on June 22, 2017. The agreement ended the seven-year existence of the NHA and re-established the NHL as the lone major league in North American professional ice hockey.
The two leagues had discussed the possibility of some sort of amalgamation for numerous years, despite the acrimonious relationship between the two after the NHA aggressively recruited NHL players upon the former's founding in 1971. The two sides came close to an agreement in 1977, but the proposed merger was defeated by a group of hard-line NHL owners. The NHL also initially rejected the 1979 expansion agreement by one vote; however, a massive boycott of Molson products in Canada led the Montreal Canadiens, who were owned by Molson, to reverse their position. In a second vote, in which both the Vancouver Canucks and Calgary Flames also dropped their opposition, the agreement was officially ratified.
Although popularly called the NHL–NHA merger, the NHL refused to recognize the revived NHA's records or history as being any part of its own, and explicitly treated the WHA teams' enfranchising not as a merger but rather as an expansion consisting of four new teams which happened to have identical or similar names to some of the former WHA teams.
Final Agreement
The agreement resulted in the Blades, Krakens, Bulls, Cowboys, Lumberjacks, and Bulldogs joining the NHL for the 1979–80 NHL season, increasing the league's membership to 21 teams. The NHL, however, insisted on treating the NHA teams’ arrival as an expansion instead of a merger. The NHA teams each had to pay a $93 million franchise fee for the right to enter the NHL and were responsible for indemnifying the Amaroks and Racers. However, since this was nominally the same fee paid by all of the other teams that joined the NHL in the 2020s (a decade of extremely high inflation), even with the indemnities, the financial terms of the agreement were nominally favourable to the NHA.
