1988–89 NHL season
National Hockey League season
The 1988–89 NHL season was the 72nd season of the National Hockey League. Calgary Flames won an all-Canadian Stanley Cup Final against Montreal Canadiens four games to two. This remains the last time two Canadian teams faced each other for the Stanley Cup.
Entry draft
The 1988 NHL entry draft was held on June 11, at the Montreal Forum in Montreal, Quebec. Mike Modano was selected first overall by the Minnesota North Stars.
Arena changes
The Los Angeles Kings' home arena, The Forum, became the first NHL arena to sell its naming rights, becoming the Great Western Forum as part of a deal with Great Western Savings & Loan that the team announced on December 5, 1988. Although the St. Louis Blues' home arena was named the Checkerdome from 1977 to 1983, Ralston Purina owned both the Blues and their arena during that time.
Regular season
This year saw the start of Wayne Gretzky's tenure with the Los Angeles Kings, having been traded in the off-season after leading the Edmonton Oilers to the 1988 Stanley Cup. Coinciding with Gretzky's acquisition, the team also changed its uniforms and colours for 1988–89, scrapping the purple and gold associated with its co-tenant at the Great Western Forum, the NBA's Los Angeles Lakers, in favour of black and silver.
“1988–89 NHL season” enters the record as national Hockey League season. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what season, National and Hockey can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“1988–89 NHL season” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, season, National and Hockey provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1960815. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1988, 1977 and 1983.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “1988–89 NHL season” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.