1939: Hockey, Ice

It is estimated that there were 5,000,000 paid admissions in the United States to witness the games of ice hockey during the past season. The professional game has gone ahead with such leaps and bounds in the big cities, that the National Hockey Professional League, the major league in the sport, claims an average attendance of 10,000 persons daring its seven-team schedule. Ice hockey is now the most important feature of the winter program in Madison Square Garden, New York City.

In the major league (the National Professional Hockey League), the Boston Bruins fought out a nip-and-tuck series with the New York Rangers for the Stanley Cup, emblematic of the world's championship. Among the fast-moving minor league combinations, the Philadelphia Ramblers won in the Eastern Division, and the Hershey team in the Western Division of the International Hockey League; the St. Louis Flyers outplayed the others in the American Hockey Association, and the Portland team finished first in the Pacific Coast Hockey League.

The national A.A.U. ice hockey championship was won by the Cleveland American Legion, which defeated the Minnesota Gophers. An increasing number of district associations of the A.A.U. now promote the sport. Among leading amateur teams in the big circuits, the New York Rovers led in the Eastern Amateur Hockey League and also bested the Holzbaugh Fords of Detroit in a post-season series for the championship of the United States Amateur Hockey Association, a newly organized outlaw amateur group. The Jamaica Hawks won the title in the Metropolitan (New York) Hockey League.

Stanley Cup Finals (best 4 of 7 games): April 6 — Boston 2, Toronto 1; April 9 — Toronto 3, Boston 2 (overtime); April 11 — Boston 3, Toronto 1; April 13 — Boston 2, Toronto 0; April 16 — Boston 3, Toronto 1, Boston vanquished Toronto, 4 games to 1.

In one of the few championship contests on foreign soil, a team of Canadian skaters known as the Trail (B. C.) Smoke Eaters won a so-called world amateur crown by defeating a United States team, at Basle, Switzerland. In Canadian amateur hockey, honors were divided between the East and West — the Port Arthur Bear Cats captured the Allen Cup, symbolic of the championship of Canada; the Oshawa Generals won the Memorial Cup in the junior competition. McGill University won the International Intercollegiate Ice Hockey League crown.