This is the story of Kansas City’s attempt to integrate major-league hockey into its sports marketplace, only to see it fall through thin ice. Troy Treasure, an award-winning sports reporter, tells the riveting story of the Kansas City Scouts, who began playing in the National Hockey League in 1974. Perhaps the franchise’s owners should have guessed it would be a struggle from the beginning: After finally getting an arena, its original name—the Mo-Hawks—was rejected because the Chicago Blackhawks thought it too closely resembled their moniker. But while the franchise underperformed on the ice and at the box office, there was also triumphs and plenty of laughs mixed in with the tears. During their two years on the ice, the Scouts featured the biggest on-ice badass in the NHL, a combustible coach, and one of hockey’s all-time funny men. Filled with player interviews and painstakingly researched, this book pays tribute to the history of professional hockey in Kansas City, the city’s other pro sports teams, and athletics at large.

More than twenty years after departing Hartford, Connecticut, for Raleigh, North Carolina, the NHL's Whalers continue to inspire passion among fans. As HartfordBusiness.com reported in 2015, "Whalers merchandise...still has a cult following not only among fans in Connecticut but around the country." But Whalers devotees aren't just clamoring for jerseys, hats and t-shirts. They're nostalgic for a team that had New England roots for nearly 25 years--in Boston, Springfield, and Hartford--and featured some of the greatest players in NHL history, including Gordie Howe (with his sons Mark and Marty), Bobby Hull, and Ron Francis. Pat Pickens’s book details the Whalers’ origin in Boston in 1972, the team’s WHA championship in 1973, the roof collapse of their home arena that indirectly led to their entrance to the NHL in 1979, their stunning NHL playoff-series win against the top-seeded Quebec Nordiques in 1986, the 1986-87 season when they claimed their first division championship, and their relocation south in 1997 as the Carolina Hurricanes. Pickens imagines a Stanley Cup delivered to hockey-crazed Hartford in 2006, when the Hurricanes instead brought it home to North Carolina. The book also explores the likelihood of an NHL team returning to the Nutmeg State.