When the NHL announced in early 1976 that its two worst teams, the Washington Capitals and Kansas City Scouts, would travel to Japan for a four-game exhibition series dubbed the Coca-Cola Bottlers’ Cup, fans and media were baffled. The Capitals and the Scouts were both expansion teams, with a combined 46 wins, 236 losses and 38 ties in their first two seasons—stats made more dismal when considering seven of those wins were against each other. Yet lagging so hopelessly behind the rest of the NHL, they were perfect for a one-off event on the other side of the globe. The series was an eye-opening success. Players skated on an Olympic swimming pool ringed with rickety boards hung with fishing nets that boomeranged pucks into their faces, as curious Japanese fans gasped at the gap-toothed Canadians wrestling on the ice. Filled with rare photos and player recollections, this book tells the story of how two league doormats became hockey heroes half-way around the world.
This is my second book, following The California Golden Seals: a Tale of White Skates, Red Ink, and One of the NHL's Most Outlandish Teams (2017). You can visit my Seals tribute site, GoldenSealsHockey.com, which I update weekly. Be sure to check out the Seals Hall of Fame, as well as the Hockey Hall of Shame, which currently houses virtual exhibits of some of the worst ideas and hockey cards the sport has ever seen. I currently reside in Ottawa, Ontario, with my wife and two children, and I have been working as a French as a second language teacher since 2008. Most of our clientele are Canadian federal public servants looking to satisfy the second language requirements for their jobs.
The book is available for purchase at Amazon.ca, Amazon.com, and on the McFarland Press website.
Preface from book:
As the Washington Capitals and Kansas City Scouts lined up for the opening puck drop of the fourth and final game of the “Coca Cola Bottlers’ Cup Pro Ice Hockey Series” (also known as the “NHL Japan” series), the players could only look back fondly on what had been a wild adventure. Despite finishing the 1975–76 season with, by a wide margin, the two worst records in the league they had unexpectedly been gifted a golden opportunity to experience the beauty and diversity of Japanese culture, and to play hockey in front of enthusiastic crowds that simply could not get enough of their eccentricities, missing teeth, and flailing fists. Sure, games were played on top of an Olympic swimming pool complete with diving boards hovering over one end of the rink, and players risked life and limb checking each other into boards kept in place by nothing more than a few cement blocks, but competing in a foreign country while living it up in a luxury hotel was not supposed to happen to cellar-dwellers. Everyone who participated in the series was treated first-class by their hosts. There was talk that this series could become an annual event. There was also an all-expenses paid stopover in Hawaii to enjoy on the way back home. For the first time in the clubs’ two-year existence, life was pretty sweet.
Tommy McVie, the Capitals’ insatiable head coach had put his boys through the wringer the last three-and-a-half months, but the torture worked wonders. McVie had eliminated the country-club atmosphere that had poisoned the dressing room since the team’s inception. Now, his boys were focused. They were ready to kick some Kansas City ass! McVie was absolutely convinced he had the better team. In his mind, this series was no vacation; it was an early training camp for the next season, and he couldn’t wait for October to arrive so he could unleash his now-lean and mean team on the unsuspecting NHL.
On the opposite side of the rink, the Scouts could only wonder if this was going to be the last time they would be sporting their outlandish blue, red and yellow uniforms featuring the proud Native American warrior on horseback. Prospects hadn’t looked so hot in Kansas City as the Japan trip loomed. Attendance at Kemper Arena had been second worst in the league and the Scouts’ many minority owners were jumping ship as the club desperately tried to sell enough season tickets to make the club solvent. After ending the season on a NHL-record 27-game winless streak, game four was an opportunity to salvage a little pride, not to mention send veteran defenseman Gary Bergman off into retirement a winner.
At the conclusion of the fourth game, the winning team would be awarded the Coca-Cola Bottlers’ Cup, a trophy that did not exactly measure up to the storied Stanley Cup. According to current Capitals director of hockey operations Kris Wagner, it looked like “a horse racing trophy” or what “a horse eats oats out of after a race.” The oversized brass trophy had big elegant horns on each side and resembled something Bjorn Borg would have captured in his heyday. The cup sat atop a wooden base whose brass name plate indicated the trophy’s full name and the winner of the 1976 NHL Japan series. It was really nothing of great note. Most everyone involved in the series still has no idea what happened to it all those years ago. The cup has become less than a footnote in the history of the NHL and the Washington Capitals.
So why bother writing a book on the story of one of the most inconsequential trophies in professional sports history? Despite its less-than-stellar reputation, the Coca-Cola Bottlers’ Cup is a symbol of hope, a confirmation of big-league legitimacy, a reward for hard work and determination. The original intention of the NHL Japan series may have been to spread goodwill and promote the game, but at the series’ conclusion it became obvious that the games had meant so much more to everyone involved, and that’s what this book explores, but to fully appreciate the story of the Coca-Cola Cup, and to fully recognize the uniqueness of the event, it is imperative to understand the unique series of events that led up to it.
One needs to look back to the root of this series, the 1974 expansion draft, whose conditions were so constricting, whose pool of available players was so poor, and whose very existence was so ill-timed and unnecessary that it spawned two franchises that were so utterly awful they were the only ones who could ever be invited to Japan. It was this needless expansion, one stemming from a combination of greed, spite, and lack of foresight, that eventually led to the Coca-Cola sponsored series.
“There’s an old saying, ‘War is hell.’ Expansion’s worse,” former Capitals coach Tom McVie once said. With apologies to anyone who has ever lived through an actual war, McVie wasn’t entirely wrong. After all, he had the misfortune of coaching the Caps during the latter half of the 1975–76 season. As the schedule came to a close that year, the Capitals had played a grand total of 160 games in their short two-year history… and won 19.
The Capitals’ expansion cousins, the Kansas City Scouts fared little better, winning 27. To put those numbers into perspective, the Caps and Scouts lost 74% of their games those two years. In the first 320 games played by these two teams between 1974 and 1976, their overall record was an almost-impossible-to-believe 46–236–38, which becomes an even more depressing stat when one realizes that seven of those wins were against each other. Many teams win 46 games in a single season; it took the Scouts and Caps a combined four seasons to reach that mark! Yes, there were futility records a-plenty set in K.C. and D.C., many of which still stand, and are likely untouchable thanks to the advances in coaching and goaltending, not to mention a salary cap, which have thankfully brought parity to the game.
As Sports Illustrated’s Alex Prewitt once described the Capitals’ first season as having “reshaped careers and recolored legacies,” but that phrase can easily apply to the Scouts as well.[ii] To this day, several members of both clubs refuse to talk about their experiences. Many requests for interviews—from myself, and from other writers doing research for their own books and articles—were either ignored or flatly turned down. Too many bad memories, which for some, need to remain dead and buried.
The Capitals and Scouts’ first two seasons are quite fascinating in that never before or since have there been two teams who were so closely linked in their ineptitude and hopelessness, and yet, in April 1976, they were invited to Japan to compete in a one-of-a-kind four-game exhibition series. It was perceived as a minor affair, and it sadly remains a mere footnote in the history of hockey, but players from both teams left Japan with memories that would last a lifetime. The long-forgotten event was the seed that eventually sprouted into this book.
I had read about the series in a 1976 issue of The Hockey News and I had always wanted to understand why in the world the NHL, Japan, Coca-Cola, or anyone for that matter, would want to not only invite what were undoubtedly the two worst teams in professional hockey, but pay them to promote the game in a land where the sport barely registered a pulse. It simply made no sense.
I interviewed several players who participated in the series to fill in some of the blanks so I could write an article for the Society for International Hockey Research’s annual journal. The players I interviewed told so many incredibly funny stories about their experiences on and off the ice that limiting this research to a single article did not do justice to the Coca-Cola Cup tale.
In the mid-to-late 1970s professional hockey had plummeted to its nadir. “It was a mess…” wrote Jeff Z. Klein and Karl-Erik Reif about the 1970s expansion boom in their 1998 book The Death of Hockey, “First-division clubs routinely ran up double-digit scores against second-division sides,” the latter of which included both Washington and Kansas City.[iii] It hadn’t always been this way. In 1967, the NHL expanded from six to twelve teams, and the new teams were somewhat competitive because there had been enough talent to supply six new franchises. Three years later, the league expanded to Buffalo and Vancouver, followed by the additions of Atlanta and Long Island two years after that. That same year, the World Hockey Association was formed adding 12 more teams to the sporting landscape, bringing the overall number of hockey teams to 28, which put an enormous strain on the overall level of talent, thus hurting the flow and quality of the game.
Then came the expansion, or more precisely expansions of 1974: Washington and Kansas City in the NHL, and Indianapolis and Phoenix in the WHA, meaning four new teams being birthed when there was simply no room for more offspring. How the NHL and WHA managed to find enough players to fill the rosters of 32 teams is mind-boggling.
To put things into perspective, in the NHL of 2020, there are but 31 teams, which isn’t even an issue because the NHL not only has the luxury of drafting talented players from across Europe, including former Eastern Bloc countries such as Russia, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. That was all but impossible in the 1970s as those countries were closed off to North America. Other European nations such as Finland, Germany, and Switzerland had very few players of NHL calibre, and the United States only produced a few star players. That is no longer the case as the U.S. and Europe have since caught up to Canada in its production of high-quality players.
In today’s NHL, the ten-goal blowouts Klein and Reif alluded to are about as rare as unicorn sightings, and the NHL’s salary cap makes it all but impossible for any team to plummet so far to the bottom of the standings one would need a harness and a long length of rope to reach them. So, one should not bet on ever seeing a reincarnation of the mid–1970s Washington Capitals and Kansas City Scouts ever again, and thus no reprise of the Coca-Cola Cup series, which makes the event even more unique.
In speaking to members of the Scouts and Capitals, no one admitted that participating in the Coca-Cola Cup would have ever been a career objective. The Coca-Cola Cup was the furthest thing from every professional player’s ultimate goal, the Stanley Cup. After two years of abject failure and misery, however, the Coca-Cola Cup, while no priceless silver chalice, it was a silver lining.
Robin Norwood, “McVie Is Proof That NHL Expansion Builds Characters,” Los Angeles Times, Apr. 18, 1993.
[ii] Alex Prewitt, “How the Washington Capitals turned in – and recovered from – the worst NHL season ever,” Sports Illustrated (online) Jan. 11, 2017.
[iii] Jeff Z. Klein and Karl-Erik Reif, The Death of Hockey (Toronto: Macmillan Canada, 1998), 13.
