Since being expelled from the North American Hockey Confederation in 1917, Jack Connolly had been loudly proclaiming that he'd be back with a league of his own. And though this was mostly treated as so much noise by the NAHC and the western-based Transcontinental Hockey Association, Connolly was working towards his stated goal. 

The first decision was the easy one: Connolly wanted to build his league in virgin territory - the large and densely populated cities of the United States. While the TCHA had put clubs in both Portland and Seattle, those cities were far from the big metropolises east of the Mississippi. And while hockey was nowhere near as popular as baseball, it also wouldn't compete with the spring and summer sport - and the amateur version of hockey was popular, particularly in the northeast and around the Great Lakes. So Connolly courted wealthy and sports-minded individuals in large U.S. cities like New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and Detroit. Those were the places in which he wanted to plant his flag.

The issue was finding the right people. Connolly was not known for humility and liked to be the center of attention and the loudest voice in the room. But the type of men who would take a risk on a new league in an unproven sport would have to be Type-A personalities themselves. So Connolly swallowed his pride and sought out men like himself. And he found a few of them, though convincing them to join him took every ounce of his considerable salesmanship. First to sign on was Francis "Frank" Denny of Boston. Not only did Denny love the sport, he had built his own arena (complete with ice plant) in Boston. Another was found in New York: Sam Bigsby, whose family owned baseball's New York Gothams, had built what he called "the world's greatest arena" in Manhattan, dubbed it Bigsby Gardens and had brought in ice skating shows, circuses and college basketball games.

Connolly himself would run a team, presumably in Buffalo where he had an arena lined up, leaving one franchise available. At first he approached Eddie Thompson about a Detroit franchise. Thompson, who owned both the baseball Detroit Dynamos and an arena, was holding out for an NAHC club and refused. Next choice was Chicago, where he was hoping to get Washington Whitney to sign on, but Whitney was focused solely on his baseball club and also refused. That left Philadelphia. A new arena, to be built by Thomas Franklin (who always joked he was "no relation to old Ben"), was mired in red tape. Franklin was on board, but the arena would need to be built (it was during this time that Connolly suggested he might put a team in Quebec - partly to tweak the NAHC and partly to push Philadelphia into moving on the construction permits).

Eventually the arena was approved - and would be ready for play in the fall of 1921. That meant that Connolly's new league was a go.

He called it the "United States Hockey Association" and it would begin play in December of 1921 with the Boston Bees (owned by Frank Denny), Buffalo Bears (owned by Jack Connolly and Thomas Everett, who owned the arena), New York Shamrocks (owned by Sam Bigsby) and Philadelphia Rascals (owned by Tom Franklin). The league would play 24 games, the same as the NAHC and TCHA, and immediately requested permission to be in the Challenge Cup competition.

Both the NAHC and TCHA predictably howled long and hard about not allowing the USHA to be considered for Challenge Cup play. Connolly had foreseen this and so he went directly to the Yeadon brothers with a proposal. The USHA would honor all TCHA contracts if the Yeadons agreed to have their champion play the USHA champ for the right to face the NAHC champions for the Cup. George Yeadon, shrewd as he was, felt this was a good idea. On the one hand, it would limit the inevitable player raids to NAHC clubs and on the other hand, his clubs would be able to play their way into the Cup, which appealed to his competitive nature - if they couldn't beat the upstarts from the USHA, they didn't deserve to play for the Cup. Once the TCHA removed its objections, the Cup's trustees agreed to the new format. Everyone was happy - except the NAHC.

Most of the NAHC's fall meeting involved the new league. With the exception of the new owners in Quebec, the executive board of the NAHC was all-too familiar with Connolly and his tactics. There was also consternation about the deep pockets of the Bigsby family and the first-class facilities the new league had in three of its four cities (Buffalo's arena was older and smaller, but still had an artificial ice plant). Ultimately, no concrete plans were made aside from a rejoinder to "batten down the hatches" and try to weather the storm. The NAHC would take its time finding a strategy to counter Connolly's latest scheme.