We’ve seen that the calibre of the World Hockey Association’s top stars was high enough to call the WHA major league hockey. But hockey is not a superstar game. J. C. Tremblay was a great player; him and five AHLers make a good AHL defense. Your team would get smoked by the worst team in the NHL in a seven-game series and nothing Tremblay could do would make much difference. How can we judge how good the actual teams, from Bobby Hull down to the worst fourth-line goon, actually were compared to the NHL?
Just on the off chance a young person is reading this, I’ll tell you something old WHA fans know: the one way you must not answer this question is by looking at what the four WHA teams accepted into the NHL did there. The NHL-WHA merger is often called a “surrender,” where the NHL teams ruthlessly pillaged the WHA of their talent. It was a bit better than that; the WHA teams were permitted to keep three to four players officially, and in practice kept many more as the NHL’s hard line softened once it was official that they’d actually have to share a business with these guys. True, there was some lingering NHL spite: making the WHA teams pick last in the Entry Draft rather than first, and denying Wayne Gretzky the Calder trophy on the grounds that he already had major-league experience. This did not wind up hurting that much: of the four Hall-of-Famers selected in the first round in 1979, two went to WHA teams (Michel Goulet to the Nords and Kevin Lowe to the Oilers), and Gretzky’s legacy is fairly safe. They lost most of their top stars, but not all of them, and the NHL honoured Gretzky’s personal services contract with Peter Pocklington rather than fight it. They were more like “expansion teams plus” than true expansion teams. Only the Quebec Nordiques finished last in their division their first year in the NHL, and they weren’t a bad last. However, what they weren’t was representative of the teams as they played in the WHA.
Going through each player on each roster would be more noise than signal. If you can compare half-century-old third-liners across two different leagues statistically and come out with a comprehensible result you are a better man than I. In baseball you can look at a guy who hit .280 and the pitching he faced and say something; in hockey ice time matters and we don’t know it. There isn’t enough video for even objective comparisons, and who’d have the time to watch it if there was? What we want is a corpus of how WHA teams played against NHL teams, or teams that NHL teams can otherwise be compared to; very fortunately, we have it.
The acid test to determine how the WHA compared to NHL teams would be head-to-head games. 68 or so1 such games took place in September and October exhibitions; that they happened at all is an implicit recognition of the WHA’s major league credentials, and that the WHA finished with a winning record must seal it. Granted, the arrangement of the games was flattering to the WHA. Take a look at Appendix 1 if you want the game results, with as much data as I could dredge up on the details. The WHA usually (but not always!) had its stronger teams against usually (but not always!) middling or bad NHL teams, and almost always the WHA team was at home. These were preseason games where the roster quality was naturally mixed. Both the WHA and the NHL teams did preseason things, swapping goalies and trying out nobodies, but the WHA teams tended to take them more seriously than the NHL teams, playing purely for a preseason tuneup and better gate receipts then they’d get at home. When we have records, the NHL teams generally ran out good, solid preseason lineups, not farm teams in the big team’s sweaters.
While from context we can say that the WHA record wasn’t as good as it looked, it was certainly of major league standard. Home ice advantage was stronger then, which makes sense because travel was such a pain: let’s say that home teams on average took 60% of the points, and that every game was “home” for the WHA: both oversimplifications but good enough for napkin math. Figuring out what “the WHA cared more” was worth has to be subjective, so we won’t even try yet but we’ll bear it in mind. In their 68 exhibition games, spread over four seasons, the WHA had a winning record: 34 wins, 27 losses, and 7 ties; they took 75 out of a possible 136 points, or 55.15%. Normalizing that to “neutral site” means about a .450 record; incontestably major league. If a .200 record, which is about about the “ordinarily terrible NHL team” limit of the era, is the end of what you’d consider “major league performance” (and it’s as good a number to work with as any)2, you’d need to halve the WHA’s neutral-site winning percentage based off intangibles, and I don’t think the historic record supports that.
The WHA’s worst team ever was the 1974–75 Michigan Stags/Baltimore Blades, who posted a record of 21-53-4. With the exception of Marc Tardif, who was only there for a third of the season, and goalie Gerry Desjardins, who played 331 NHL games, most of their players were nobodies. Even so, go through them player-by-player and you’ll see a lot of guys who, whatever they were in the WHA (and it usually wasn’t much), were very good minor-leaguers. It was a team of AAA and AAAA guys with zero star power and a ton of off-ice problems (thus, “Michigan Stags/Baltimore Blades”). They’d have won any minor league; they got killed in the WHA. Most had at least modest major league careers outside Michigan/Baltimore. Certainly several were sub-major league talents but that was not the rule; they were really bad, but still a cut above the minor league level.
