Before the NHL, there was the National Hockey Association (NHA), a professional league that had been operating in Canada since 1910. By 1917, the NHA's owners had grown tired of one of their fellow owners: Eddie Livingstone, who ran the Toronto Blueshirts and had a reputation for being difficult to work with, dragging teams into disputes and legal threats.
Rather than keep fighting with Livingstone inside the NHA, the other owners found a simpler solution: they formed an entirely new league without him. On November 26, 1917, at a meeting in Montreal, representatives from the Montreal Canadiens, Montreal Wanderers, Ottawa Senators, and Quebec Bulldogs agreed to create the National Hockey League. A new team was set up in Toronto to replace Livingstone's Blueshirts in everything but name, and the NHA quietly stopped operating.
The new league's first season was rough by any modern standard. World War I had thinned rosters, since many players had enlisted. The Quebec Bulldogs didn't have enough players to compete and sat out the season entirely, leaving just three teams. Then, in January 1918, the Montreal Wanderers' home arena burned down. Rather than find a new rink, the Wanderers simply folded partway through the season, leaving the NHL with two teams for a stretch.
None of that early instability suggested a league built to last more than a century. But the Canadiens, Senators, and the Toronto club kept playing, the league slowly stabilized, and by the 1920s the NHL began expanding into the United States — the Boston Bruins joined in 1924 as the league's first American franchise, opening the door to the cross-border league recognized today.
It's a strange origin story for what became the world's premier hockey league: not a grand vision, but a practical workaround for a personality conflict among a handful of team owners in a Montreal boardroom. Whatever the motivation, that November 1917 meeting is the starting point for every NHL season that's followed.