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.

The saga of the Oakland/California Seals nine-year journey through the NHL is a strange, funny and sad tale that is nearly forgotten and has never been told...until now. Off the ice, the history of the Seals is practically a tale of how not to run a franchise. The team joined the NHL in 1967 as part of the "Second Six" expansion teams and stayed in Oakland until moving to Cleveland in 1976. The Seals had seven different ownership groups in nine years and chaos reigned throughout the process. This book shows you the inner workings of a hockey club that was always on the brink of bankruptcy and/or relocating and takes you behind the scenes of many of the mistakes made by NHL owners and executives during the early years of expansion. It also chronicles the crazy days of ownership by Charlie Finley, a man who admittedly knew nothing about hockey but knew he wanted to run his team his way. Hilarity and disaster resulted. On the ice, the Seals met with little success but were never dull. In nine years, the team had to put up with white skates, few fans and a cast of characters that were unique This book allows the players and coaches to tell their own story. More than 110 interviews were conducted with former Seals players, owners, coaches and employees to get a clear picture of what it was like to play in the NHL in the 60s and 70s. The rise of the WHA, continuing expansion and more hilarious stories of what really happens to an NHL team on the road and in the locker room. Hockey fans will love this true tale of the Seals.hockey's most colorful team.

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.

This unique book presents ways to mitigate the disastrous effects of snow/ice accumulation and discusses the mechanisms of new coatings deicing technologies. The strategies currently used to combat ice accumulation problems involve chemical, mechanical or electrical approaches. These are expensive and labor intensive, and the use of chemicals raises serious environmental concerns. The availability of truly icephobic surfaces or coatings will be a big boon in preventing the devastating effects of ice accumulation. Currently, there is tremendous interest in harnessing nanotechnology in rendering surfaces icephobic or in devising icephobic surface materials and coatings, and all signals indicate that such interest will continue unabated in the future. As the key issue regarding icephobic materials or coatings is their durability, much effort is being spent in developing surface materials or coatings which can be effective over a long period. With the tremendous activity in this arena, there is strong hope that in the not too distant future, durable surface materials or coatings will come to fruition. This book contains 20 chapters by subject matter experts and is divided into three parts— Part 1: Fundamentals of Ice Formation and Characterization; Part 2: Ice Adhesion and Its Measurement; and Part 3: Methods to Mitigate Ice Adhesion. The topics covered include: factors influencing the formation, adhesion and friction of ice; ice nucleation on solid surfaces; physics of ice nucleation and growth on a surface; condensation frosting; defrosting properties of structured surfaces; relationship between surface free energy and ice adhesion to surfaces; metrology of ice adhesion; test methods for quantifying ice adhesion strength to surfaces; interlaboratory studies of ice adhesion strength; mechanisms of surface icing and deicing technologies; icephobicities of superhydrophobic surfaces; anti-icing using microstructured surfaces; icephobic surfaces: features and challenges; bio-inspired anti-icing surface materials; durability of anti-icing coatings; durability of icephobic coatings; bio-inspired icephobic coatings; protection from ice accretion on aircraft; and numerical modeling and its application to inflight icing.