There are professional teams based in Canada in several professional sports leagues. The National Hockey League currently has seven Canadian franchises and is the most popular professional sports league in Canada. The Canadian Football League is the only all-Canadian major professional sports league. Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and Major League Soccer also have Canadian teams.
Ice hockey
Professionalism in ice hockey goes back to the start of the 20th century. The Stanley Cup was originally an amateur championship for Canada that began in 1893, but after 1906, professionals were allowed to play for it and quickly came to dominate the most successful teams. After 1908 the Allan Cup became Canada's amateur title and the Stanley Cup become a professional trophy, and after 1914 was opened to teams from the United States.
Several rival leagues competed to dominate the professional hockey market in the early years but the National Hockey Association (1910–1917) was the most successful in Central Canada while the Pacific Coast Hockey Association (1912–1924) was the most successful in British Columbia and the American Northwest, and the champions of the two leagues would face each other for the Stanley Cup each year until 1914 to 1921.
The NHA became the NHL in 1917 when the Montreal Canadiens, Montreal Wanderers, Ottawa Senators and Quebec Bulldogs agreed to form a new league without the Toronto Blueshirts and their hated owner Eddie Livingstone. Quebec sat out the first two seasons, the Blueshirts were replaced by the Toronto Arenas, and the Wanderers folded after the first season in the new league. However the league slowly stabilized and solidified. The NHL began to expand into the United States starting with Boston Bruins in 1924, which helped it financially. However, in trend to be repeated through the NHL's history, many of its Canadian teams in small markets struggled to compete with their richer big-city Canadian and American rivals forcing the Quebec Bulldogs to move and become the Hamilton Tigers in 1920 and to fold in 1925.
The PCHA was founded in 1912 by the New Westminster Royals, Vancouver Millionaires, Victoria Senators. The PCHA was limited in its growth compared to the NHL by Western Canada's much smaller and more disperse population relative to the East, especially at that times, and attempted to expand to the United States to compensate, but hockey was not as successful in cities like Portland and Seattle as in Boston or New York and the PCHA struggled in comparison to the NHL. When it folded in 1921 two of its teams joined the prairie-based Western Canada Hockey League (1921–1926) initially of the Edmonton Eskimos, Calgary Tigers, Regina Capitals, and Saskatoon Sheiks. The WCHL also challenged the NHL for the Stanley Cup, but when the WCHL folded in 1926 the NHL took over the Stanley Cup and became the most prestigious hockey league in the world.
The NHL gradually became more American as expansion franchises appeared and Canadian teams folded or moved. The Ottawa Senators became the St. Louis Eagles in 1934 (and then folded), and the Montreal Maroons (1924–1938) folded as well, the last Stanley Cup winning team to have done so.
Only two serious challenges have come to the NHL's reign of dominance from within Canada since that time. The minor league Western Hockey League (1952–1974) had grown in numbers and quality during the 1960s, and seemed ready to become a major league. The NHL effectively crushed this upstart by expanding for the first time in decades beginning in 1967, included the absorption of the Vancouver Canucks in 1970. The World Hockey Association (1972–1979) included in teams in Canadian markets not yet served by the NHL including most successfully the Edmonton Oilers, Quebec Nordiques, and Winnipeg Jets, (less successfully as the Calgary Broncos, Calgary Cowboys, Ottawa Nationals, and Ottawa Civics) and hoped to compete directly with the NHL within their most profitable Canadian markets in the shape of the Toronto Toros and Vancouver Blazers. The WHA was plagued by franchise instability but the Edmonton, Winnipeg, and Quebec teams were considered strong enough that they were invited to join the NHL in 1979. The Atlanta Flames moved to Calgary to become the Calgary Flames in 1980.
