Cleveland Barons, Last Franchise to Fold

Go ahead, ask the biggest sports fans you can find the question – they’ll never get it.

But the Barons happened, even if they never should have relocated from the Bay Area just weeks before the 1976 season. That’s an easy call in hindsight of course, but back then there was reason to believe that an NHL team such as the floundering California Golden Seals could make it in Cleveland.

After all, this was a city that had successfully hosted the first incarnation of the Barons, an AHL team that won nine Calder Cups between 1937 and 1973 and came within a whisker of becoming the first NHL expansion team, twice.