The team was supposed to have been located in San Francisco, but the arena was never built and instead, the team was based across the bay in Oakland. First called the California Seals to appeal to fans in San Francisco and address complaints from other NHL teams that complained that Oakland was not considered a major league city, as it's only other professional sports team at the time was the Oakland Raiders of the American Football League. On November 6, 1967, owner Barry Van Gerbig announced that the team's name was being changed to the Oakland Seals.
Poor attendance led to Van Gerbig threatening to move the club and a poor record on the ice led to only seven of the original 20 players remaining on the team in it's second season. While they did finish with records below .500, they would make the playoffs for the next two seasons, the only times the club would qualify for the post season in their history.
Van Gerbig sold the team to a group called Trans National Communications in time for the 1969-70 season, but when the group filed for bankruptcy, ownership reverted to Van Gerbig, who put the club up for sale again.
The Oakland Seals were then purchased by Charlie O. Finley, owner of the Oakland Athletics baseball club, who had moved to the bay area in 1968. Never one to sit still, Finley renamed the team the California Golden Seals and altered the team's green and blue colors to green and gold, matching those worn by his baseball club, as well as having the team wear flashy white skates!
Unfortunately the the Golden Seals finished dead last in the NHL during their first season under Finley's ownership with just 45 points from 78 games. Even worse,their first overall pick in the 1971 NHL Entry Draft, along with Francois Lacombe, had already been traded to the Montreal Canadiens for their first round pick in 1970, used by he Golden Seals to take Chris Oddleifson, Ernie Hicke and the always useful cash. The Canadiens used the draft choice obtained from the Golden Seals to select future Hall of Famer Guy Lafleur.
The team improved by 15 points the following season, but suffered from the emergence of the World Hockey Association, as the frugal Finley refused to match the WHA's contract offers to his players resulting in five of the team's top ten scorers leaving and the Golden Seals once again sank to the bottom of the standings with 48 points in 1972-73 and followed that up with just 36 points in 1973-74.
Matters were made worse, if that's possible, by a divisional restructuring which somehow found the Golden Seals placed in the newly created Adams Division with the Boston Bruins, Buffalo Sabres and Toronto Maple Leafs, in an apparent effort by the league to kill off the franchise, as each of the other clubs were a minimum of 2300 miles to the east!
Having grown tired of owning the hockey team, especially in direct comparison to his World Champion baseball team, Finley tried unsuccessfully to sell the Golden Seals, which were eventually eventually taken over by the NHL.
Melvin Swig then purchased the team in 1975 with plans to have the team play in a new arena in San Francisco. Those plans never came to pass following the election of a new mayor opposed to the plan, so after nine money-losing seasons, low attendance and few victories, minority owners George and Gordon Gund convinced Swig to relocate the team to their hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, a move that was announced on this date in 1976, making the club the first NHL team to relocate since 1934 and bringing to and end the Golden Seals ordeal in California, where the team had more names than playoff appearances.
Politically, Swig and the Gunds were relying on Swig's political connections with San Francisco Mayor Joseph L. Alioto to get a new hockey arena built downtown. "Alioto was very helpful, " Gund remembered. "He had hoped to put the team where the Moscone Center is now. It was very close to public transportation."Regrettably for the Seals, Swig's timing was off. Alioto was leaving office and Swig supported the wrong man in the 1975 election. When George Moscone took office, the new arena died. "The new mayor put the building on hold." Len Shapiro said. "He ran an investigation into the report and then said the survey had to be resurveyed , so basically, it went nowhere. Then there were plans to remodel the Cow Palace but that never happened either." Once those two plans fell through, the Seals were finished in the Bay Area."After the new arena in San Francisco fell through, the league gave us the go-ahead to move the team." Gund remembered. "We looked at a lot of other places. We looked at Denver and Seattle-Tacoma. We ended up picking Cleveland because hockey was very popular there."Rumors that the Seals would leave the Bay Area were almost as old as the team itself. The owners were quietly but aggressively looking over other locations. The NHL had planned expansion franchises for both Seattle and Denver, which were supposed to begin play in 1976-77. The new entires, though, were experiencing problems so moving the Seals to those cities was still a possibility.Shapiro recalled when he first got an inkling the team might be leaving. "On February 1, 1976, I realized something might be up. I was in the office with Loretta Marcus [the team's secretary] and nobody else was there. I had no idea where anybody was. I looked at Munson Campbell's schedule and it said he was booked at the Cleveland Hilton. Then I knew something must be up."George and Gordon Gund owned the Richfield Coliseum in Richfield, Ohio, where the NBA's Cleveland Cavaliers played. It was halfway between Akron and Cleveland, a location that would cause the franchise more problems in the future. In typical Seals fashion, even it's exit was not smooth. The club participated in the July 1976 entry draft as the Seals and even started selling tickets for the upcoming season in Oakland.At the 1976 entry draft, the Seals made history by becoming the first NHL team to use its frist-round draft pick on a European player by drafting Swedish defenseman Bjorn Johansson. The team didn't make it's intention to move officially known until August 26, 1976. It was announced that the team would move to Cleveland and take the name of the AHL franchise that played there for so many years, the Barons. Because of the late move, the Barons had a mere six weeks to sell tickets in their new home. Once again, the franchise started its new life behind the proverbial eight ball.
Under the Gunds ownership, the Barons played in Ohio for two seasons, merged with the Minnesota North Stars, who were then sold to another group while the Gunds received an NHL expansion franchise, the San Jose Sharks, at the south end of San Francisco Bay, 40 miles from where it all started.
Today's featured jersey is a 1974-75 California Golden Seals Marv Edwards jersey. After the departure of owner Charlie O. Finley, the Golden Seals colors were changed from his signature green and gold to the even less intimidating "Pacific Blue" (teal) and "California Gold" (yellow), quite probably the worst colors for an NHL team ever, and also giving the team more color schemes in the end than playoff appearances as well.
Another odd characteristic of these jerseys were the decidedly "football jersey" vertical stripes where the arms meet the body of the jersey, something we don't believe has ever appeared on an NHL jersey before.
We actually had not planned on including these jerseys in the "Curious, Weird and Ugly" Collection of the past couple of weeks, originally planning on simply a look at the Seals history on the anniversary of their move to Cleveland, but the more we looked at their final teal and yellow set of jerseys, the worse they looked and the more we knew we had to add one more to the collection. We rate this jersey as "Curious", "Weird" and "Ugly", for a rare trifecta.
Curious are the football stripes on the upper arms, while weird is the choice of pastel colors for a team in a full-contact sport. Honestly, I've seen more intimidating Easter eggs. While the gold and purple of the Los Angeles Kings was unorthodox, it was at least explainable as relating to the colors of royalty and the purple dark enough to offer some contrast to the gold while the choice of teal and yellow leaves me repeating "Only in California" as the whole package of odd striping, inappropriate colors and bland logo can only add up to ugly without a doubt.
Not even the addition of goaltender Gary Simmons' black goalie mask with a frightening green cobra was enough to offset the "only in California" colors of the Golden Seals final jersey set.
Here are some fantastic old videos of the Seals in action. Check out those rinkside seats for $5.50 and playoff tickets for $12. Sign me up!
We don't care how hard you punch, there's just no dignity in wearing those teal jerseys.
I remember the Seals. I use to like their team colors. They would draw 6,000 to 7000 fans at the Oakland Alameda County Colesium Arena. I'm from Philadelphia. I was in Oakland in 1990 to watch the A's play. I was looking at the former home rink of the Seals. Not a bad looking place.I started talking to a security guard and he never heard of the Seals. He worked there for 20 years. I was shocked to hear him say that. The Seals played in Oakland from 1967 to 1976. I just wish they will playing in the Bay Area. I almost forgot, they had awesome team logo in their first few years in Oakland. That's all I have to say. The Seals are now a memory.
ReplyDelete