The Cleveland Barons were an honest to God, living and breathing NHL team, until they became the last major US sports franchise to fold

Ever heard of the Cleveland Barons? Don’t feel badly if you haven’t because you’re not alone. Who were they? They were a real, honest-to-goodness National Hockey League team ... or just about. Or just barely. A blip in the NHL’s books, the Barons skated for just two completely and utterly fruitless seasons between 1976 and 1978, and if not for some last-minute wheeling and dealing, they might have slipped into oblivion even before their inevitable expiration. When they finally did flee the scene, their main legacy was in a link to a trivia question – name the last “Big Four” team (NHL, NBA, MLB and NFL) to cease operations.

Go ahead, ask the biggest sports fans you can find the question – they’ll never get it.

But the Barons happened, even if they never should have relocated from the Bay Area just weeks before the 1976 season. That’s an easy call in hindsight of course, but back then there was reason to believe that an NHL team such as the floundering California Golden Seals could make it in Cleveland.

After all, this was a city that had successfully hosted the first incarnation of the Barons, an AHL team that won nine Calder Cups between 1937 and 1973 and came within a whisker of becoming the first NHL expansion team, twice.

And so what if the Crusaders of the the WHA (an upstart rival league to the NHL) had played before sparse crowds in Cleveland from 1972 to 1976 - well, that wasn’t a real league anyway.



And then there was that nearly forgotten fact that Cleveland was such a good hockey town, the Canadiens nearly moved to Cleveland in the 1930s before the plan fell through.



The Canadiens? To Cleveland? What? Photograph: New York Herald

When the shift finally did arrive, hockey moved to Cleveland for the reason most professional sports organizations pick up (hockey) sticks – they had a venue issue. Mel Swig, the then owner of the California Golden Seals, had his team skating in one of the smallest rinks in the NHL - the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum. When a sweetheart deal for a 17,000 seat arena from then San Francisco mayor Joseph Alioto disappeared after he lost the election, minority-owner George Gund, a prominent native Clevelander, convinced the franchise to head east and take on the name of the one-time AHL team.

With so little time to prepare for the season and promote the reincarnated Barons, few of Cleveland’s citizens knew they now had a team. They were bound for the sparkling, “state-of-the-art” Richfield Coliseum, one of the first to contain luxury suites (located so high they were the worst seats in the building). The venue was home to the NBA’s Cavaliers and located between Akron and Cleveland,and featured minimal public transportation options. The “idea” was to make the most of the roughly five million people living in the area.

The Barons were on, but who was listening? Illustration: unknown

The Barons played in the old Prince Of Wales Conference in the Adams Division with the Boston Bruins, Buffalo Sabres and Toronto Maple Leafs. On Opening night, 6 October 1976, the Kings flew in from Los Angeles to help usher in Cleveland’s NHL era, and were joined by just 8,889 fans, who watched the locals pick up a point in a 2-2 tie. Three nights later Jack Evans coached his men to their first win, beating the Washington Capitals in front of just 5,209 souls. The result was good but the local interest was sapping for an ownership that had carried optimism from California to Cleveland.

“We had the big, cavernous building in the middle of a farmer’s field and we couldn’t draw flies,” winger Gary Sabourin told the Guardian while reminiscing about the not-so-good times at the end of his solid, 10-year NHL career. “It wasn’t a very good experience.”

Not for Saborin, not for anyone, especially ownership. It was so bad that Swig headed up to Vancouver for the 1977 All-Star Game and told the league brass that his club was leaking millions and desperately needed a bailout.

“The Board of Governors were stunned,” said Rich Passan, then hockey beat writer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “Nothing like that had happened to them since the 1930s or 40s when the league was finding itself in the sports world.”

Swig was denied funding, and by the time February rolled around the team had suffered through multiple winless streaks in front of average crowds of under 5,300, all during a time when gate made up a vital portion of team revenues. Center Dennis Maruk was one of many Golden Seals who had made the move from the West Coast” “I spent the first years of my career playing on some bad teams, and a writer once asked me, ‘How did you survive it, how did you continue on?’ It was frustrating. We lost a lot of close games but we were never a strong team and didn’t have a lot of fan support. As a professional player you just had to go out and do your job.”

Until your employer doesn’t pay you that is. The Barons’ ownership was overwhelmed by losses which had reached some $2.4m, a lot of cash back in 1976. Workers didn’t get checks for two months, paper companies didn’t deliver coffee cups, video tape machines were being reclaimed. That was the climate in which Swig asked the players to take a pay cut of over 27% - the answer was a resounding no and the team missed two February payrolls. It brought the sort of chaos that would be unrecognizable in today’s lucrative NHL.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bob Stewart, player representative of the Cleveland Barons hockey team, discusses his team-mates’ discontent at a press conference in February 1977. Photograph: G Paul Burnett/AP

“It was very tough because you weren’t making a lot of money then,” said Sabourin. “People have children and people miss a paycheck and it’s like any job. It was nerve-racking to say the least.”

“A lot of us were staying in apartments in Akron in some condos and just sitting around waiting to say goodbye to each other,” said Maruk. “We were told the team was going to fold and that there could be a dispersal draft.”

That’s right – a mid-season draft to liquidate the Barons’ assets evenly across the NHL was a realistic option. If you asked the deep pocketed New York Rangers, well, they would have preferred an auction to bring the best of the NHL’s worst to Broadway. None of it was ideal of course, the 18-team NHL was in a depressed state and the Barons weren’t the only team in financial trouble - far from it. Peter Gammons (yes, that Peter Gammons, he once covered hockey!) of Sports Illustrated spoke with the then NHL Players’s Association head Alan Eagleson in March of 1977.

“This Cleveland situation is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Eagleson at the time. “Look, if we filed protests all over the place and forced the owners to live by every word in the collective-bargaining agreement, we could have bankrupted half a dozen teams this season. But we don’t want to bankrupt anyone.



“The players don’t mind inconveniences in certain instances. However, it’s about time the league realizes it has to strengthen itself and get rid of these constant crises. They’ve got to stop bailing out one another. NHL teams will lose $15 to $18m overall this year. The only answer is a restructuring of the NHL back to 14 or 15 teams.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dennis Maruk is one of the few players that played with the California Golden Seals, Cleveland Barons and the Minnesota North Stars, three downtrodden NHL franchises that were all linked. Photograph: B Bennett/Getty Images

Defenseman and Barons player representative Bob Stewart declared that without pay, the team were set to strike against Colorado on 18 February, 1977. Eagleson, (who would later become one of the most disgraced figures in NHL history, but that’s another story) would step in and successfully earn a stay with his players before a $1.3m solution was announced that allowed the Barons to skate on: Swig would pay $350,000, the other 17 NHL owners would dole out $20,000 a piece and the NHLPA would take out a loan for $600,000.



The Hockey News called it “one of the most bizarre rescue missions seen in the realm of professional sport.” The Barons had payroll covered for the rest of the season, surviving just long enough to finish in last place with 63 points.

Swig had enough, and sold the team for $5.3m to George Gund and his brother Gordon, who decided to have another crack in the 1977-1978 season. The brothers were as close to Cleveland royalty as you could get with their father, George II, starting the family tradition of philanthropy.

As it happened, the family would give away vast sums to entertain the small numbers of Barons fans who came out to watch the teams lose games 11-1 and 13-3 to the Philadelphia Flyers and Sabres respectively. The Gunds promoted the team heavily while tirelessly studying the market for any kind of opening. It didn’t help that with just a few television stations to push their product, local channels had negotiating leverage, choking another potentially lucrative revenue stream.

Perhaps the coverage was big league. The Barons? Not so much. Illustration: Unknown

In November they managed to beat the future Stanley Cup Champion Montréal Canadiens 2-1 at home in what probably was the highpoint in franchise history. Some six weeks later they also defeated strong New York Islanders, Buffalo Sabres and Toronto Maple Leafs teams, at home, on the trot. Nothing it seemed would move the needle.

“Harry Howell was our general manager and he was just shaking his head when he didn’t see much of a turnout from win streak or in the game against Montréal,” Gordon Gund, now 75, told the Guardian. “So that wasn’t funny. Especially because it was the city we grew up in, we felt a great deal of love for it, it was very hard. We were sad because we couldn’t make it work there and we were taking away a professional sports team from the city. We were going to have to unwind it, but it turned out the best solution was to merge it.”

The Gunds went into talks with the Minnesota North Stars, who were also losing vast sums of money, a more shocking revelation because the franchise played in “The State of Hockey”.

“We didn’t know if the league would approve what we said we needed to do until we had to do it,” said Gund, whose elder brother died in 2013. “A lot of people weren’t sure they wanted to merge the teams until they understood the facts which was just have one team fold instead of two, and what would that look like for the league.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Believe it - the Barons once beat the Canadiens...but it wasn’t this game.

The Gunds took over the ownership of Minnesota, forfeited the Barons’ draft picks and a dispersal draft was organized. The “new” North Stars protected 12 players from the two rosters and the five worst teams in the league were eligible for the unique one-round draft held in the spring of 1978.

Roughly a decade later, the brothers Gund would attempt to head back to the Bay Area by moving the North Stars (who would eventually move to Dallas), a shift that was vetoed by the NHL. Eventually they would hit the hockey jackpot by landing the rights to the 1991 expansion San Jose Sharks in another complex deal that allowed them to take some of the North Stars players with them.

Meanwhile, the disbanded Barons, who finished with just 47 wins, 89 loses and 26 ties, are a team lost to history - gone, and virtually forgotten, which for Sabourin isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

“It was horrendous. They should be forgotten.”