1938 Detroit Red Wings–Montreal Canadiens European tour

Lore & Background

The idea of NHL teams playing exhibition games in Europe dates back to 1924, when Frank Patrick wanted the Montreal Canadiens to join his Vancouver Maroons in London during the British Empire Exhibition. Those plans did not materialize. In 1932, Lester Patrick of the New York Rangers also failed to arrange a European tour with the Canadiens, due to a lack of proper hockey rinks. A 1935 plan by Canadiens general manager Leo Dandurand for an eight-game tour of London, Paris, Berlin, and Milan also fell through, as did a 1936 proposal for fifteen games across Europe. Notably, Toe Blake did not score overtime winners in the first game (April 21) or on May 10; the first game ended in a 2–2 tie and the May 10 game was a 5–3 Montreal win. The largest margin of victory in the tour was not Detroit's 10–5 win on May 7 but Montreal's 8–1 win on May 3.

Reader's Guide

After the Detroit Red Wings failed to make the 1938 playoffs and the Montreal Canadiens were eliminated in the first round, tentative plans for a European tour emerged. On March 29, 1938, Armand Vincent announced arrangements for a tour by Detroit and Montreal, surprising Canadiens head coach Cecil Hart. The tour was officially announced on April 1, though the required $2,500 deposit from the British Ice Hockey Association had not yet been made as late as two days before departure. The teams played three pre-tour exhibition games in Nova Scotia before sailing from Halifax on the RMS Ausonia on April 9. The tour consisted of two games in England, three in France, and four more in England. The Canadiens won the series 5–3–1. The tour was received enthusiastically despite poor publicity, though English fans were disappointed by the lack of body-checking. Each player earned $250. Hart believed professional hockey was still five years off in Europe due to a lack of rinks, but noted the packed crowds and potential for future tours.

Did You Know?

• The game on 21 April 1938 was not the first organized by any major professional sports league outside North America; that distinction belongs to the 1936 MLB all-stars tour of Japan.
• An offer to play in Switzerland was turned down because of scheduling conflicts, not because it came a day prior to departure.

Pioneering the International Stage

In 1938, the Detroit Red Wings and the Montreal Canadiens accomplished something no professional hockey club had done before: they brought NHL play to European soil. The two franchises traveled to Paris and London, staging a series of games that marked the very first time NHL talent had laced up skates on the continent. For a league still largely confined to North American rinks, this tour represented a bold step into uncharted territory. The Red Wings, who had only recently shed their earlier identities as the Cougars and Falcons, carried the banner of a franchise that had been renamed just six years earlier by grain merchant James E. Norris. The Canadiens, with their deeper Stanley Cup pedigree, were the natural counterpart for such a historic outing. Together, these two clubs opened a door that would remain closed for decades, planting the seed for the international expansion of professional hockey that would eventually reshape the sport's global identity.

The Record on Ice

The nine games the Red Wings played against the Canadiens during the 1938 European tour produced a record of three wins, five losses, and one draw. While the Wings came away with a losing ledger, the very fact that they could split the series at all speaks to the competitiveness of the matchup. The Canadiens, who would go on to accumulate the most Stanley Cup titles of any active NHL franchise, clearly held the edge over the course of the nine contests. Yet Detroit's three victories and a single tie demonstrated that the Red Wings, fresh off back-to-back Stanley Cup triumphs in 1936 and 1937, were no mere tourists. Under the long tenure of Jack Adams, who would become the face of the franchise for 36 years as either coach or general manager, the Wings had built a reputation for toughness and playoff success. Their ability to win three of nine games against the league's most decorated club on foreign ice underscored that the Red Wings were a force capable of competing at the highest level, even far from the familiar boards of Olympia Stadium in Detroit.

A Seventy-One-Year Silence

The 1938 tour in Paris and London would stand as a singular event in Red Wings history for an extraordinarily long time. The franchise did not play in Europe again until the preseason and early stretch of the 2009–10 NHL season, when they traveled to Sweden to face the St. Louis Blues. That gap of seventy-one years underscores just how rare and remarkable the original 1938 outing was. In the intervening decades, the Red Wings went on to become one of the most successful American franchises in the league, winning eleven Stanley Cups and earning the nickname "Hockeytown" for their devoted fan base. They endured a remarkable playoff streak of twenty-five consecutive appearances from 1990–91 through 2015–16, and captured four additional championships in 1997, 1998, 2002, and 2008. Yet none of that domestic success brought the team back to European ice for over seven decades. The 1938 tour remained a unique chapter, a one-time brush with the continent that the franchise would not revisit until the sport's global reach had expanded dramatically.

Champions in Their Prime

By the time the Red Wings boarded a plane for Paris and London in 1938, they were riding the crest of a remarkable early dynasty. Just two seasons prior, in 1936, Detroit had captured their first-ever Stanley Cup, defeating the Toronto Maple Leafs in four games. The following year, they repeated as champions, overcoming the New York Rangers in a full five-game series. This back-to-back success had been built on the foundation laid by James E. Norris, who purchased the struggling Falcons in 1932 and immediately rebranded them as the Red Wings, drawing inspiration from the winged-wheel emblem of the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association. Norris also retained Jack Adams, who would go on to define the franchise for 36 years. The 1938 European tour thus carried the weight of a team that had transformed from a bottom-feeding club into a championship powerhouse in just a handful of seasons. Carrying that momentum onto foreign ice, the Wings were not merely participating in a novelty trip; they were extending the story of a franchise that had, in the span of six years, gone from obscurity to the pinnacle of North American hockey.