How One Loan Killed the Hartford Whalers

Thanks for watching all the way through. Click the link below to subscribe    / @fadedstandings   When the Connecticut Development Authority bought the Hartford Whalers in 1994, it never meant to keep them. It sold the club on for exactly the same money to a group led by Peter Karmanos, and financed twenty-five and a half million dollars of the forty-seven and a half million price itself. In return Karmanos committed to four seasons in Hartford, through the one that would end in the spring of 1998, and after those four seasons he could move the club if it had lost at least thirty million dollars. The state made losing the way out, and the figure sat on the owner's own books rather than on attendance. By the first day of 1997, halfway through the third season, the threshold had already been passed: twenty million lost the previous season and fourteen million projected for the one being played. Only a calendar was left. Karmanos did not wait it out. He negotiated his exit a year early, and instead of the five million relocation fee the state went after twenty and a half million in deferred payments with interest on top, which is fifteen and a half million more than waiting would have cost him. The club began in November 1971 as a World Hockey Association franchise handed to four New England businessmen and told to put a team in Boston. Fourth in line for dates at Boston Garden, it won the first championship the league ever awarded in 1973 and then left for a new arena in downtown Hartford, playing its first game there on the eleventh of January, 1975. Gordie Howe arrived from Houston in 1977 with his sons Mark and Marty and led the team in scoring at forty-nine. On the night of the seventeenth of January, 1978, the University of Connecticut beat Massachusetts at the Civic Center in front of about four thousand seven hundred people. At around twenty past four the next morning the roof came down. The findings from the litigation did not blame the snow: compression members had been undersized, the loads on them underestimated, and the bracing insufficient. The roof had been failing from the moment it was installed. The Whalers played two years in Springfield, Massachusetts, and returned to a rebuilt arena on the sixth of February, 1980, by then in the National Hockey League. In eighteen NHL seasons the Hartford Whalers had three winning seasons and won a single playoff series, a sweep of Quebec in the spring of 1986. On the fourth of March, 1991, they traded Ron Francis and Ulf Samuelsson to Pittsburgh, where both won the Stanley Cup that June and again the following year. The club reached the playoffs once more, in 1992, and never played another postseason game in Hartford. The pressure was real, and none of it is hidden here. The market was small, local television was worth about a million dollars a year against a league where clubs told each other five was normal, and the club asked for a new arena the governor had said in public he did not want to fund. The Save the Whale campaign sold eight thousand five hundred and sixty-three season tickets in under forty-five days and still fell short of the eleven thousand Karmanos had named. But all of it came after the loss threshold had been crossed, and none of it changed the condition that let him leave. The last game was played on the afternoon of Sunday, the thirteenth of April, 1997, in front of fourteen thousand six hundred and sixty people. Hartford beat Tampa Bay two to one. Captain Kevin Dineen scored twenty-four seconds into the third period, the last goal the Hartford Whalers ever scored. The franchise plays today as the Carolina Hurricanes, and won the Stanley Cup in 2006 and again in 2026. Sources Ed Miller, "Is the NHL worth it?", The Virginian-Pilot, January 1, 1997, on the 1994 purchase, the state's financing, the relocation condition and the club's losses WRAL news archive, wire report from early May 1997, on the proposal to double the price of leaving and the governor's office response Hockey-Reference and ESPN box scores, Tampa Bay Lightning at Hartford Whalers, April 13, 1997 ConnecticutHistory.org, on the move to Hartford and the years in Springfield PeoplesBank Arena (formerly the Hartford Civic Center), arena history, on the 1978 roof collapse and the 1980 reopening Patch (Tim Jensen), on the UConn game of January 17, 1978 and the collapse Published engineering findings on the failure of the Civic Center space-frame roof FunWhileItLasted.net, franchise record of the New England and Hartford Whalers ESPN/Associated Press (2023) and CT Insider (2024), on the arena renovation Season records, standings and box scores, WHA and NHL, 1972-73 to 1996-97 (hockey-reference.com, eliteprospects.com)