The NHL’s Mistake by the Lake: A History of the Cleveland Barons

This was the way it was supposed to have been.

On a Saturday night in June of 2016, almost 20,000 fans rose to their feet in Clevelands Quicken Loans Arena after Oliver Bjorkstrand poked the puck into the opposing teams net with less than two seconds to play in the first sudden death overtime period, giving the home team a thrilling 10 victory and a four-game sweep of the championship finals. The crowd was the second largest in American Hockey League history, which dates back to 1935. The victory in the cup finals was the first by a hockey team representing Cleveland in 52 years.

The bedlam in Quicken Loans Arena was precisely what Mel Swig had envisioned when he and his co-owners, George Gund III and Bud Levitas, hastily moved the Oakland-based California Golden Seals of the National Hockey League to Cleveland in the summer of 1976. But the cup hoisted by the players in 2016 wasnt the Stanley Cup. It was the Calder Cup, symbolic of the championship of the American Hockey League, the sports highest minor league. And though the players hoisting the Calder Cup wore the same red, white and black colors, they werent the Barons of Swig, Gund and Levitas. They were the Lake Erie Monsters, who took the place of the two minor league clubs that succeeded the Barons. Swigs team lasted just two seasons in the Richfield Coliseum, the sports palace halfway between Cleveland and Akron. Swig owned the team for only the first of those seasons. It never came close to filling the Coliseum even once, as the Monsters had done in Quicken Loans Arena the night they won the Calder Cup.

The Monsters triumphant moment should never have happened, because the Barons should never have faltered as badly as they did after relocating to Cleveland, a city with a proud hockey tradition. The 20152016 season should have been the franchises 39th in northeastern Ohio, and the cup they would have been competing for would have been Lord Stanleys, the oldest prize in professional sports. But the Barons, and the NHL, departed Cleveland after two miserable seasons, leaving the city without a hockey team for 14 years. The International Hockey League transferred its Muskegon, Michigan, franchise to Cleveland in 1992. When that league folded, the AHL, of which the original Barons had been a member from 1937 until 1973, returned.

Sports writers have long observed that otherwise smart and astute businesspeople often check their acumen at the door when they purchase a professional sports team. Such was the case with Swig and Gund when they decided that they couldnt keep the Golden Seals in Oakland one more minute. A gleaming new building in northeastern Ohio beckoned, and the decision to move the team there seems to have consisted of little more than Gund, a native Clevelander, suggesting to Swig that he transfer the Golden Seals to Cleveland and Swig, after considering the suggestion for all of 30 seconds, responding, Sure, why not? Had Swig and Gund run the businesses that made their families rich the same way they would run the renamed Golden Seals once they arrived in Cleveland, theyd never have had the money to invest in professional hockey in the first place. Theyd have been fortunate to find the money to buy a ticket to watch someone elses team play.

The Cleveland Barons of the NHL are the last major league sports franchise in North America to fold. Their demise could almost have been foretold from the moment they arrived in July of 1976. Swig and, later and to a lesser extent, Gund and his brother Gordon seemed to think that the NHL brand alone would be more than enough to attract large crowds to the Coliseum to watch an inferior product. And northeastern Ohios hockey fans, for some reason, seemed to resent the Barons rather than welcome them.

The decade of the 1970s was a tough one for Cleveland. Jokes about the city abounded in the national media, some of them well-deserved. The Cleveland Barons were one of those jokes. This book is for northeastern Ohio hockey fans who have the stomach to relive the citys mercifully brief flirtation with the National Hockey League. And for anyone who enjoys reading about a good disaster. Because theres no other way to describe Clevelands experience with major league hockey between July of 1976 and June of 1978. And theres no other way of describing major league hockeys experience with its Oakland/Cleveland franchise between 1967 and 1978. It was an $11 million fiasco, the last 23 months of which are revisited in detail in the pages that follow.