1997–98 NHL season
sports season
The 1997–98 NHL season was the 81st regular season of the National Hockey League (NHL). For the first time, there was a break in the regular season to allow NHL players join their respective national hockey teams competing at the Winter Olympics. The Hartford Whalers relocated to North Carolina, becoming the Carolina Hurricanes. The Stanley Cup champions were the Detroit Red Wings, who swept the Washington Capitals in four games.
League business
Approval of four expansion teams
On June 25, 1997, the National Hockey League approved of four expansion franchises for Nashville, Atlanta, Columbus, and Saint Paul expanding the league to 30 teams by 2000. These franchises became the Nashville Predators in 1998, the Atlanta Thrashers in 1999, and the Columbus Blue Jackets and Minnesota Wild in 2000.
To accommodate the incoming expansion teams, 1997–98 became the last season of the four-division quasi-geographic alignment inherited from the traditional Adams/Patrick/Norris/Smythe set. The league would change the following season to a six-division, more purely geographic alignment, with the Toronto Maple Leafs moving from the Western to Eastern Conference, among others.
Franchise relocation
The Hartford Whalers relocated to North Carolina, becoming the Carolina Hurricanes. They would remain in the Northeast Division until realignment the following season.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “1997–98 NHL season” is sports season. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through season and sports, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “sports season” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1240991. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1997, 2000, 1998 and 1999.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. 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 “1997–98 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.