WHA Card of the Month - May 2012

Whoops, barely got the WHA Card of the Month in for May!  Nothing like procrastinating and finishing something on the last possible day. So far this year we've looked at all the O-Pee-Chee WHA sets from the '72-73 high numbers through the '75-76 set.  Might as well keep going in chronological order...

1976-77 O-Pee-Chee WHA - #132 - World Trophy Finals

The '76-77 O-Pee-Chee WHA set is not amongst my favorites.  I find the design to be a little bland, and for whatever reason the cards just don't excite me.  This will likely be the last WHA set that I attempt to complete.  Nevertheless, I wanted to cover as broad a range of sets as possible in these posts, so when I found this card on the cheap I went for it.

This is the very last card in the '76-77 set, and it commemorates the Winnipeg Jets winning the World Trophy as WHA Champions in '75-76.  This was the first league championship for Winnipeg, though they would go on to win two more (the final two WHA Championships in '77-78 and '78-79) before the league folded.  Depicted at center is the WHA's Avco World Cup.  Yes, the WHA's trophy had a corporate sponsor.  Between the corporate sponsorship and the gaudiness of the trophy itself, this award just never even came close to holding the same significance as the Stanley Cup.  It's hard to tell from this photo but there's a floating crystal ball embedded in the trophy just below the bowl at the top.  You can get a better look at the trophy on its Wikipedia page.  At least Winnipeg had a trophy to hoist, which was more than you could say for the New England Whalers when they won the league's inaugural championship a few years earlier (how sad is that?).

As you can see from the back, the Jets handled the Houston Aeros easily in the finals, sweeping in four games.  This was a battle of two powerhouses, as both teams accumulated a league-best 106 points in the regular season.  The Jets proved to be the better team in the playoffs though, as Houston struggled through two 7-game series before losing to Winnipeg in the finals.  The Jets, however, lost only a single playoff game in 1976, going 12-1 overall.

Check back soon for a post on a hockey "white whale" that I recently tracked down...