Before the NHL, There Were the Metropolitans

Everybody knows the headline: Seattle won the first Stanley Cup by a U.S. team. 1917. Before the NHL even existed.

What most people don't know is that the team behind that headline is one of the strangest rosters in hockey history. Nine seasons. One Stanley Cup, one championship canceled by a pandemic, one Stanley Cup loss, and enough true stories to make a scripted show look restrained.

Here's what actually happened.

The Coach Skated on 26-Inch Stilts

Pete Muldoon wasn't born Pete Muldoon. He was born Colonel Linton Treacy, and he built a new name because pro sports carried a stigma back home. Before he ever coached a game, he was a boxer, a trained ice dancer, and a performer who gave skating exhibitions on stilts that put his blades roughly 26 inches off the ice.

He said it just took nerve. And whistling.

This is the guy who built the Metropolitans roster from scratch, pulling players off Toronto's 1914 championship team and turning a brand-new expansion club into a Stanley Cup winner in year two.

The Curse That Followed Him Out of Seattle Was Completely Made Up

Muldoon later became the first coach of the Chicago Black Hawks. Legend says that when he got fired, he cursed the franchise to never finish in first place again — and Chicago didn't finish first for nearly 40 years.

Great story. Also fiction. The sportswriter who invented it later admitted he made it up to fill a column on deadline. The real Pete Muldoon — stilts, boxing, championship rosters and all — didn't need a fake curse to be interesting.

Their Best Scorer Went From the Stanley Cup Final to Alcatraz

Bernie Morris scored the winning goal in Seattle's first-ever game and put up a PCHA-record season. In the 1917 Final, he scored 14 goals in four games — six of them in the clinching game alone.

In 1919, right as Seattle returned to the Final, Morris was arrested on a wartime military registration matter. He was convicted and sent to the military prison at Alcatraz. He missed the rest of the series. A year later, he received an honorable discharge and went straight back to Seattle's lineup. He was never charged with anything beyond the original case, and historical records don't show his conviction was ever formally overturned — just that his military status was resolved enough to send him home to play.

It's one of the strangest career interruptions in sports history, full stop.

A Stanley Cup Final Game Went 80 Minutes Without a Legal Goal

Also in 1919: Game 4 of the Final ran through three regulation periods and two overtimes — 80 minutes — with the score stuck at 0-0. Seattle thought they'd scored late in the first period, but the referee ruled his whistle had blown roughly half a second before the puck crossed the line. Players were carried off the ice at the end.

Then the series ended with no champion at all. Influenza tore through Montreal's roster so badly they couldn't field a team for the deciding game. Canadiens defenseman Joe Hall died from the flu in a Seattle hospital days later. The NHL's official record still lists 1919 as "no decision" — the only Stanley Cup Final in history that ended that way.

One Guy Played Major League Baseball AND the NHL. Nobody Else Has.

Jim Riley spent seven seasons with Seattle, played Major League Baseball for the St. Louis Browns and Washington Senators, and later played NHL games for Detroit and Chicago. The NHL's own historical record states he's the only person to ever play both leagues.

Summers on a baseball diamond, winters on the ice. That's just what being an athlete looked like in 1920.

The Stanley Cup Itself Has a Typo From That Season

Go look at the old engraving from Seattle's win: it reads "DEFEATED CANADIANS 1917." Not Canadiens. Canadians. The trophy has been carrying a spelling mistake about Seattle's own rival for over a century.

Two Goals, Eight Seconds Apart — Still an NHL Record Today

March 22, 1919: Bobby Rowe scored at 19:30 of the third period. Frank Foyston scored at 19:38. Eight seconds apart. NHL Records still lists it as the fastest two goals by one team in Stanley Cup Final history. Over a hundred years later, nobody's touched it.

The Team Didn't Fold Because Seattle Stopped Caring

The easy version of the story is "hockey didn't catch on in Seattle." The real version: the Metropolitans packed their arena from night one, stayed competitive for nine straight seasons, and only folded because their building got converted into automobile parking. The team lost its rink, not its fans.

Two Cup Champions Retired Into Turkey Farming Next Door to Each Other

Frank Foyston and Bernie Morris — captain and scoring legend of the same championship team — ended up raising turkeys on neighboring farms near Port Orchard. A photo from 1938 shows two of the best players of their era standing with their livestock. No further comment necessary.

The Legacy Is Still on the Ice Today

When the Kraken raised a Metropolitans championship banner in 2021, they were honoring a team from a different league in a different century — the Mets played in the PCHA, not the NHL, and the NHL didn't exist yet when Seattle won in 1917. But the Kraken still name their team MVP award after Pete Muldoon every year. The stilts guy. The curse guy. The real one.

Shop the Collection

This is the team that made American hockey history before the NHL had a name for it. The Seattle Metropolitans Collection is built for people who know that story — or want to.

Use code MULDOON15 for $15 off the collection. Retro jerseys stay at full price.