PLEASE NOTE: This is going to be the first of a two-part series we’re doing this week (Part 2 tomorrow) on the history of expansion in North American sports leagues in the wake of the announcement that the PWHL will be adding up to four teams to the league after this season.

The announcement this past week that the Professional Women’s Hockey League (the PWHL) was officially adding a team in Detroit (which has been followed closely behind similar announcements for teams in Las Vegas and Hamilton literally as I am writing today’s newsletter) brought me back to a much simpler time in my life: The first time I saw someone wearing a Jacksonville Jaguars Starter jacket.

I don’t remember (or know if I had/have ever seen them before or since) the person’s name or why they were wearing it — we lived in New York and they weren’t even playing yet — but it was a blonde girl on the school bus in the spring of 1995, during the “second semester” of 2nd grade¹. Unbeknownst to me (as I was 7) two new teams had been announced as part of a planned² expansion in the NFL with the city of Jacksonville being awarded the Jaguars roughly two month after Charlotte had been awarded the Panthers³. What was beknownst to me was literally every other team in the league to that point, as I had spent much of my earliest childhood as a reader memorizing sports almanacs.

The shock of seeing a new team of whom I had been previously unaware, along with the … interesting … color choices of the Jaguars, led me to become somewhat obsessed with the idea of expansion teams, as it was also a concept about which I did not know about until that fateful day. That there had been several in my lifetime prior to learning about the Jags was something I didn’t discover until several years later, as I had assumed — as most children do — that all that had existed before my memory started to solidify had been in place forever, unchanged.

Even teams like the Colorado Rockies and Florida Marlins⁴ felt like I had discovered them in media res in a way that the birth of the Jags simply did not. So, for teams like the Charlotte Hornets, Miami Heat, Orlando Magic, Minnesota Timberwolves, Ottawa Senators, Tampa Bay Lightning, San Jose Sharks and Florida Panthers to have not existed until after I was born blew my mind.

The only team I was even remotely aware of being birthed in the same way as the Jags (and tangentially, the Panthers) were the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, who I assumed were a fake/promotional team created specifically to support the cinematic epics that constituted the Mighty Ducks franchise⁵ and would go away after their first season. The reasons for this lack of awareness went beyond me being a small child, however.

Although there had been (as seen above) a shitton of new teams added all over the continent, none of them were particularly close to where I was in the Northeast, nor did their addition to their respective leagues significantly change the structure of the leagues. And, at least in the NFL, the inclusion of the Panthers and Jaguars was the first time something like that had happened since 1976 (11 years before I was born) when the Seattle Seahawks and Tampa Bay Buccaneers entered the league.

Other leagues had toyed a bit more with expansions in previously uncharted areas during the 20 year gap that the NFL had remained (mostly) static⁶, but from a “total amount of teams” perspective, all these new entities were essentially a drop in the bucket in terms of the amount of franchises in each organization. The idea (or even possibility) of a massive overhaul of a major sports league was something that wasn’t really feasible at the time, as The Big Four — the NHL, NBA, NFL and MLB — had done their growth spurts in the decades prior to the one in which I was born.

As you can see in this lovely data visualization⁷, most of the punctuated equilibrium-style expansions were done with mergers after years of steady-ish growth.

The MLB, for obvious reasons, had their defining merger happen fairly early on in both the modern history of athletics, in not exactly their own history, when the eight extant members of the long-standing National League (founded in 1876) joined forces with the eight teams in the “Junior Circuit” American League to form what we now know as Major League Baseball.⁸ For the NBA and NFL, adding teams in already existing happened in fits — adding members of the National Basketball League and All-American Football Conference, respectively — and starts — the absorptions of the ABA and AFL — to provide them with the base of teams they would use a platform to expand into entirely new territories.

For the NHL, there was also an influx of teams from a nominal competitor, with the WHA disbanding and four of their franchises (the Edmonton Oilers, Hartford Whalers, Quebec Nordiques and Winnipeg Jets) being added to the second oldest league in American sports. Unlike the other three “Big 4”, however, this merger wasn’t the biggest expansion of the league membership in history, as they added six teams and a whole other conference to the league in 1967 to signal the end of the ‘Original Six’⁹ era that had lasted since 1942.

This was because, the NHL (not unlike hockey itself) was largely a regional league that had smattering of northeast expats who loved the game all over the country, but had never even attempted venturing out west past Chicago since league play began in 1917. Because of this, and we’d like to think less of a need to acquire territory and juice growth for maximal short term game that is inherent to many American sports leagues, it was a deliberate choice made by the league for the long-term benefits of the existing franchise owners and their fans.

Which, of course, brings us back to the PWHL (and, quite frankly, we even did this research in the first place) and a major questions that needs to be answered about their upcoming decisions: How they expand is, both in terms of the rate at which they do it and the space they attempt to fill up while doing so, that will determine the success and, more importantly, survival of the league.

That’s a problem for us to parse in part two, however. While we will get into what happens when things go wrong — in the Big Four as well as the smaller leagues for more “obscure” sports that proliferated in the last 40-or-so years¹⁰ — tomorrow, I wanted to leave a preview of what’s coming then with something I’ve taken to calling the Stability Score and how it shakes out among the extant and extinct leagues that have dotted our glorious sporting landscape over the last century and a half: