The puck stops here

Steve Addy

Tuesday, May 29, 2001 | 10:18 a.m.

The International Hockey League will fold this week after its 56th season, having shrunk from 19 teams to 10 since 1996. Here are some key dates in IHL history:

1945 -- The four-team IHL is founded in Windsor, Ontario, to lure players returning from World War II.

1946 -- Detroit Auto Club wins first Turner Cup, beating Detroit Bright's Goodyears two games to one.

1947 -- Toledo enters league for $1,000 expansion fee.

1952 -- IHL expands to nine teams, adding Fort Wayne, Milwaukee, Cincinnati and Louisville.

1964 -- Dayton joins, but Chatham and Windsor fold, leaving IHL based solely in U.S.

1974 -- Kalamazoo (Mich.) added.

1984 -- Salt Lake and Indianapolis join.

1993 -- Las Vegas Thunder enters as 13th team.

1994 -- Salt Lake moves to Detroit; league adds Chicago, Denver, Houston and Minnesota.

1995 -- IHL climbs to all-time high 19 teams, adding Los Angeles, Orlando and San Francisco, and losing San Diego.

1996 -- Grand Rapids added; San Francisco folds; Los Angeles (to Long Beach), Peoria (San Antonio), Atlanta (Quebec) and Minnesota (Manitoba) relocate.

1997 -- Phoenix folds after eight seasons.

1998 -- San Antonio and Quebec fold after two seasons.

1999 -- Las Vegas folds after six seasons, Fort Wayne leaves after 47 and Indianapolis leaves after 11.

2000 -- Kalamazoo leaves after 26 seasons, Long Beach after four.

2001 -- IHL disbands; six teams absorbed by AHL.

When the International Hockey League announces on Friday that it's folding after 56 years of "old-time hockey," including six colorful seasons in Las Vegas, casual observers might be taken by surprise.

After all, just five years ago the IHL was making news as the hottest minor league in sports.

It had expanded into major league cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and Detroit, its expansion fee had risen from $200,000 to $5 million, and it boasted annual attendance over six million.

Seemingly, everything was pointing upward for the old bus league that sprang to life in 1945.

But the IHL's quick tumble after a half-century climb comes as no shock to Ken Stickney, former managing director of the Las Vegas Thunder, which briefly held the interest of local hockey fans from 1993-99 at the Thomas & Mack Center.

When Stickney mothballed the Thunder to stem the club's financial losses -- the total: $10 million in red ink -- he knew it wouldn't be long before other IHL clubs could no longer afford the cost of doing business.

When the league's owners approved a $1.4 million salary cap in a 1996 collective bargaining agreement with the Professional Hockey Players Association, that was the death knell for the IHL, Stickney said.

"I stood up at the meeting and said if we vote for this agreement, it will be the end of the IHL as we know it," he recalled. "The agreement passed 18-3, so obviously there were a lot of owners who felt differently than I did.

"But I sincerely believe that player salaries and a lack of control by some owners killed the league. They managed to kill a 56-year-old league. That is pretty remarkable. This wasn't some drop-in-the-bucket league we're talking about."

The IHL has declined comment, but insiders say the shutdown announcement will come Friday.

Of the 10 teams remaining from the 19 that suited up in 1995 and 1996, six are joining the American Hockey League -- Chicago, Grand Rapids, Houston, Manitoba, Milwaukee and Utah.

The other four -- Cincinnati, Detroit, Kansas City and Orlando, this season's champion -- will cease operations or move to lesser leagues. Detroit has already decided to pack it in, as the Cleveland Lumberjacks did last week, three months after the IHL office took over the team.

This consolidation of hockey's minor leagues won't alter the Las Vegas sports landscape, but it will be a nostalgic moment for fans who enjoyed the Thunder.

The local team had the IHL's highest point total two of its first three seasons, and fan favorites grew plentiful -- Clint Malarchuk, Patrice Lefebvre, Radek Bonk and NHL rent-a-holdouts Alexei Yashin and Curtis Joseph.

Stickney admits that the Thunder contributed to the salary inflation. Lefebvre made about $125,000 per year.

"Patrice was going to score just as many goals for $50,000," Stickney said. "But if the others are spending, you have to keep up. No one wants to be known as a cheapskate. But it catches up to you. If salaries had stayed reasonable, I think the Thunder would still be around."

When the average IHL salary climbed to about $65,000 in 1997, teams were flush with cash from the hefty expansion fees paid by newcomers like the Orlando Solar Bears, Grand Rapids Griffins and San Francisco Spiders.

But once the expansion money dried up, clubs began to fold or relocate almost as quickly as they had sprung up.

Franchises have always come and gone in the IHL -- there have been 94 teams in league history, including eight Toledo incarnations -- but the financial stakes weren't as high when clubs were hopping buses to Rust Belt towns like Flint, Dayton, Milwaukee and Saginaw.

After westward expansion to Salt Lake City in 1984, Phoenix in 1989 and Las Vegas in 1993, air travel began making profitability more difficult.

But player payroll was the real killer, Stickney said. The salary cap was $1.4 million in 1996-97, $1.3 million in 1997-98 and $1.2 million in succeeding years, but revenue from tickets and sponsorships couldn't pay the freight. Also, some clubs paid "taxation" penalties for going over the cap.

"It could have been solved so easily," Stickney said. "Cap salaries at $400,000 and make the penalties for going over it very severe. We were going to get the same players anyway, so why pay the stars $120,000 when you can pay them $40,000 or $50,000?

"In the economic model the league had, you had to be perfect -- good marketing, good lease, good building -- just to maybe eke out a profit. If you slipped on any one of those things, you were screwed."

Old-school teams in Fort Wayne (which joined the league in 1952) and Kalamazoo (1974) could not hope to compete once the big-market teams got involved. Fort Wayne bailed to the United Hockey League in 1999 and Kalamazoo followed last season.

To teams like the Detroit Vipers, owned by the Detroit Pistons, there was little difference in spending $1 million or $1.4 million on payroll. But the small teams didn't have NBA revenue streams to make up their losses.

Detroit was successful at the gate -- averaging more than 10,000 fans its first three seasons -- and on the ice, but even the Vipers fell on hard times these last few seasons. President Tom Wilson said he felt pressure to be successful in the shadow of the Detroit Red Wings.

"You have to win if you're in a major-league city like Detroit or Chicago," he said. "You have to win to get media attention, so you have to sign good players. The cost of victory went up and the small-market teams got priced out.

"I don't want to say (the IHL) was a house of cards, but a lot of decisions were based on expansion revenues. Teams were borrowing from tomorrow to pay for today. The (owners) in Las Vegas and Fort Wayne were saying it was a mirage. Maybe they were right."

Two years after the Thunder ceased to exist, Stickney is left with mostly fond memories of a team that had a total record of 265-177-48.

"There are games we still remember and talk about," he said. "I wish we had a do-over. There were a lot of mistakes, but we know so much more now."