At the time, there was no expansion draft in the NHL to help new teams ice competitive rosters, which in any other year would have made assembling a playoff contender extremely difficult. However, 1926 also happened to be the year the NHL's last major rival of its early era (the Western Hockey League) went out of business, so there was an abundance of top-caliber hockey talent searching for new clubs. The owners of the Rangers' expansion cousins (the Detroit Cougars and Chicago Black Hawks) opted to purchase entire WHL rosters (the Victoria Cougars and Portland Rosebuds respectively) to stock their teams. Smythe eschewed this approach, opting instead to sign who he felt were the best players from the remaining four WHL teams as well as a few NHL castaways he felt the other teams had misjudged.