About 15 years ago, the National Hockey League was a dynamic, outward-reaching league that had big plans for expansion. Not only to Tampa Bay, Nashville, and Columbus, Ohio, where it subsequently arrived, but also to the quirky and fascinating place a lot of the players seemed to be coming from.

“Europe.”

In 1994, the New York Rangers beat the Vancouver Canucks in the Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final, putting a 54-year-old curse to bed, and storming the streets of New York in a parade. The Rangers, one of the Original Six teams in the league, the one in the biggest media market, and right around the corner from the league’s head office, put the NHL back on the map, and prompted the Sports Illustrated to run a cover about “Why the NHL Is Hot … And the NBA Is Not.”

That same fall, the NHL sent the Winnipeg Jets to Helsinki, Finland, to play the first International Challenge where the Jets played two exhibition games against local teams, making it the third year in a row NHL teams had played in Europe. In 1992, the Chicago Blackhawks and Montreal Canadiens ended a 30-year drought when they faced off each other in two exhibition games at Wembley Arena in London, and the year after, the New York Rangers played against the Toronto Maple Leafs at Wembley.

Many hockey experts, especially the hopeful European ones saw the plans as a step towards the Holy Grail of pro hockey: NHL Europe.

The NFL had had its European league with teams in London, Barcelona, and Frankfurt, but it was created as a spring development league and was put on a hiatus in 1993. However, of all the major American sports, hockey was generally seen as the one with real potential, with an existing fan base to support a European division of the NHL.

A European professional hockey league has been in the works for a long time, with several constellations, and attempts made. Dennis Murphy, the serial founder of pro sports leagues – he was also behind American Basketball Association, the famous World Hockey Association, World Team Tennis, and Roller Hockey International League – founded Global Hockey League in the early 1990s.

The GHL was set to play in Los Angeles, Miami, Cleveland, Albany, and Providence, Rhode Island, as well as in Saskatoon and Hamilton in Canada, in North America. The European teams were headed to London, England; Birmingham, England; Lyons, France; Milan, Italy; Rotterdam, Netherlands; Prague, the Czech Republic; and Berlin, Germany.

The draft was set for June 1990, and each team would have had a salary cap of 2.3 million dollars. The league’s start was first postponed a year, then it folded before ever icing a team.

Soon after the 1994 International Challenge in Helsinki, the NHL seemed to have lost interest with Europe and by, instead, copying a page of the NBA’s and European soccer teams’ marketing plans, riding the Nagano Olympics’ wave, it turned towards an even bigger market in Asia.

It all seems to make sense. Europe is big. Europeans play hockey, and they seem to be good at it. The sport is popular in Europe. But the league had other priorities, like, say, expanding and relocating teams in North America. And a lockout that wiped away an entire season 2004-05.

Now the race is back on, and this time it seems like a real race. However, on the other side, there is no eccentric American with a grand plan. This time, it’s the Russians.

Backed by Gazprom, the world’s third-largest corporation, measured by market capitalization, and a company that made almost two billion dollars in profit last year, the Russians have expansion plans of their own. Last February, they announced the formation of the Kontinentalnaya Hokkeynaya Liga – the Continental Hockey League – or the KHL, and at stake is simply: world domination.

The KHL has reportedly tried to attract teams from Sweden and Finland to join the newly set-up league that currently only has two non-Russian teams, the Dynamos of Kiev and Riga, in Belarus and Latvia, respectively. None of the Scandinavian teams have taken the bait. Not just yet, anyway.

Maybe once they see how the league actually kicks off in the fall. Meanwhile, the KHL has been busy buying some credibility, vying the NHL free agents, and even some that haven’t been so free to begin with.

In addition to a slew of middle-tier European players, and home coming Russians, the KHL went after some of the biggest names in the NHL, such as Evgeni Malkin, the runner-up in the NHL scoring last season. Unfortunately for the KHL, the league’s leading scorer, Russian Alexander Ovechkin signed a 13-year deal with the Washington Capitals in January, worth 124 million dollars. (Ironically, or maybe not so ironically, two years earlier, Malkin had to “defect” from Russia, and he hid in a Helsinki apartment his agent had arranged for him when his Russian team was on a training camp in Finland).

When Malkin signed with Pittsburgh Penguins instead, the KHL went after the New York Rangers Czech star Jaromir Jagr who subsequently signed with Omsk Avantgard, a team he played with during the NHL’s 2004-05 lockout.

But that was just foreplay to the real Cold War that broke out in July.

First, the Columbus Blue Jackets signed Nikita Filatov, their 18-year-old draft pick to a three-year contract that was duly contested by the KHL that asked for compensation, even though Filatov’s contract with the CSKA, his Russian team, had expired. Since no international transfer agreement between the NHL and the European federations is in place, the NHL isn’t obligated to pay the 200 000 dollars they have paid in the past.

The International Ice Hockey Federation invited the representatives of the NHL, the KHL, and the NHLPA to Zürich for a pow wow that would help create world peace again. A day after the announcement that both parties would “respect each others’ contracts”, the KHL’s Ufa Salavat announced the signing of Alexander Radulov. The problem – as far as the NHL was concerned – was that he still has a year left in his contract with the Nashville Predators.

Why would a potential NHL star do that? Well, his agent Jay Grossman told the Nashville Tennessean that instead of the about 990 000 entry-level contract dollars he’d make in Nashville, Radulov would be paid the equivalent of about 23 million dollars.

IIHF president Rene Fasel informed the KHL that the Radulov signing was a violation of the Zürich agreement and asked it to void the contract. A week later, the IIHF suspended six players, including Radulov, while their transfers were being investigated. Of the six, only Radulov had signed with the KHL, and the five others, Filatov, Fedor Fedorov, Jason Krog, Thomas Mojzis, and Viktor Tikhonov Jr, had signed with NHL teams, while also under KHL contracts, say the Russians.

You know times have changed when the grandson of Viktor Tikhonov, the infamous Soviet coach, has signed a contract with the Wayne Gretzky -owned and coached Phoenix Coyotes, and the NHL Players Association is threatening to sue the IIHF over the suspensions.

The IIHF has also threatened to suspend the players and clubs of all international competitions, such as the World Championship and the Champions Hockey League.

Champions Hockey League? The CHL is yet another attempt to create a pan-European club competition that would pit the best European teams against each other. The CHL is backed by the IIHF, and one of the main sponsors is … Gazprom.

The IIHF is in a bit of pickle here. It’s already arm in arm with the NHL, trying to ensure the NHL’s participation in the Olympics beyond the 2010 Vancouver Games, and it’s created a new event, Victoria Cup, where the winner of the CHL will meet “an NHL team” in a challenge game. Down the road, the IIHF hopes the “NHL team” will be the Stanley Cup champion, and even further down the road, some people hope the CHL might turn to, yes, NHL’s European division.

At the same time, it’s Gazprom, and its strong man, vice president Alexander Medvedev, also the president of the KHL, who’s made the CHL possible, giving it the money that makes the Champions Hockey League attractive to the clubs. Previous installments of the European club championship have been moderate successes at best, drawing only a fraction of the local leagues’ attendance figures. However, the Gazprom-guaranteed 15-million dollar prize purse – of which the winner may get, depending of how many games it wins, over two million dollars – is big money for, for example, Scandinavian clubs that spend about 6-7 million on player salaries.

Russia is back. While only thirty Russians skated in an NHL uniform last season, the league’s two leading scorers were Russian, as were the two leading goal scorers, Ovechkin and Ilya Kovalchuk who also scored the game winning goal against Canada, in Quebec City, when Russia won its first World Championship in 15 years.

At the same time, the NHL is launching its biggest European charm attack in recent history when it sends four teams to Europe this fall. The New York Rangers will play against Metallurg Magnitogorsk, the European champion, in the inaugural Victoria Cup in Switzerland in October, then the Rangers take on the Tampa Bay Lightning twice to start their regular season in Prague, the Czech Republic. The Ottawa Senators and Pittsburgh Penguins will start their regular season with two games in Stockholm, Sweden and before that, the Senators will play an exhibition game in Gothenburg, Sweden, and the Penguins in Helsinki, Finland.

NHL Europe? Or KHL? Neither? We’ll see. The WHA folded in seven years, and GHL never got off the ground. Then again, Dennis Murphy wasn’t backed by the oligarchs.

This Cold War has just begun.