Minnesota North Stars Team History

On March 11, 1965, NHL President Clarence Campbell announced that the league would expand to twelve teams from six through the creation of a new six-team division for the 1967 – 1968 season. In response to Campbell’s announcement, a partnership of nine men, led by Walter Bush, Jr. and John Driscoll, was formed to seek a franchise for the Twin Cities area of Minnesota.

By 1978 the North Stars had missed the playoffs in five of the previous six seasons. Attendance had tailed off so rapidly that the league feared that the franchise was on the verge of folding. At this point, Gordon and George Gund III, owners of the equally strapped Cleveland Barons, stepped in with an unprecedented solution—merging the North Stars with the Barons. While the North Stars were the surviving team, the Gunds became majority owners of the merged team, and the North Stars moved from the then-five team Smythe Division to assume the Barons’ place in the Adams Division (which would otherwise have been left with only three teams) for the 1978 – 1979 season. The recently retired Nanne was named general manager, and a number of the Barons players – notably goaltender Gilles Meloche and forwards Al MacAdam and Mike Fidler – bolstered the Minnesota lineup. Furthermore, Minnesota had drafted Bobby Smith, who would go on to win the Calder Memorial Trophy as the NHL’s top rookie that year, and Steve Payne, who himself would go on to record 42 goals in his second campaign in 1979 – 1980.

By 1992, Norm Green was arranging a deal to turn the team into the L.A. Stars, playing at a new arena under construction in Anaheim, California. However, as The Walt Disney Company was already in negotiations with the NHL to create an expansion team in the area, the league instead asked Green to let Disney create the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim while the North Stars would get a relocation approval to wherever Green wanted. In January 1993, Green chose Dallas as the new home of the franchise, and the decision was formally announced on March 10. Several reasons were cited for the relocation, including poor attendance during a string of losing seasons, the failure to reach deals for a new arena in either Minneapolis or Saint Paul, and a sexual harassment lawsuit against Green that resulted in his wife threatening to leave him unless he moved the team. The subsequent decision to relocate the franchise to Texas made Green much reviled in Minnesota, where he derisively came to be known as “Norm Greed.”

Another factor that also precipitated the move to Dallas was the fact that the team refused to be moved to the Target Center, where the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves played, due to the fact that the Target Center had advertising rights for Coca-Cola at their arena, whereas the North Stars and the Met Center had Pepsi as their sponsor.

Green’s tenure as owner of the Dallas Stars was short-lived as mounting financial problems resulting from poor management plagued his non-hockey business ventures and he was forced to sell the Dallas Stars to Tom Hicks in 1996.