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On Monday, sports fans around the city celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Seattle SuperSonic’s 1979 NBA championship. Many people called it Seattle’s only professional sports championship. They were wrong. This year marks the 90th anniversary of a strange and sad occurrence in the history of Seattle’s first professional sports franchise: the Seattle Metropolitans hockey team.
Founded in 1915, the Mets were a powerhouse during the early years of the NHL. Between 1916 and 1920, they went to the Stanley Cup finals three times, winning the cup in the 1916-17 season, Seattle’s first professional championship.
Two years later in 1919, they were back in the finals against the Montreal Canadiens when tragedy struck. In an eerie reminder of this past April’s outbreak of swine flu, the Spanish Flu, which had burned through the rest of the United States and the world, finally reached Seattle. Though late in arriving, like everything else that comes to Seattle, the Spanish Flu retained its deadly force.
The 1919 Stanley Cup finals were tied at two games apiece, with one tie, when the flu hit both teams in Seattle. It infected the teams so completely that there weren’t enough players to hold a game and the finals were canceled, still the only time the cup hasn’t been awarded. Three days after it was canceled, Bad Joe Hall, a Montreal forward, died of the flu at a Seattle hospital on April 5.
The Mets never recovered. They returned to the finals the next year but lost to Ottawa. The team disbanded in 1924. In a bitter irony, the city voted to build them a new arena and eventually did build the Mercer Arena (now vacant on the Seattle Center grounds, but soon to be the administrative home of Seattle Opera). But it was too late. Like our NBA championship team, they were gone.
But when you see the Stanley Cup hosted this year, look closely at the inscriptions near the top. Somewhere in there, engraved in silver, is the name of the Seattle Metropolitans. The real champs.
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Sweet! Nice bit of history. Thanks!