1920s. For example, St. Louis did not have such a facility until an ice plant was installed in the St. Louis Arena in 1931. The Edmonton Eskimos won the regular season for the third time in five seasons, but it was the Victoria Cougars who won the league championship and moved on to play for the Stanley Cup. Expectations were high for the defending Stanley Cup champions, but Montreal's other NHL team, the Montreal Maroons, were too strong for Victoria handily beating them three games to one and out scoring them 10 to 3. By the 1925–26 season, WHL teams were openly selling players to their richer NHL rivals to stay afloat. Nevertheless, financial problems were too great to overcome, the NHL board of governors intervened by purchasing the contracts of every player in the WHL for $258,000 and the league formally disbanded. While the remnants of five former WHL teams immediately formed the professional Prairie Hockey League, the western teams had been stripped of their best players while the NHL and the Stanley Cup's trustees regarded the PrHL as a new minor league and not a continuation of the major professional WHL. The new league would contract to just three Saskatchewan-based teams by 1927 and disappear altogether in 1928. Although rival leagues were not formally barred from challenging for the Cup until 1947, the WHL's collapse left the NHL as the only top-level professional league in North America. In the meantime, the Cup trustees refused to accept challenges from any rival league. In what was the most significant expansion of its early era, the NHL added three teams for its 1926–27 season, all of which survived the Great Depression to form half of the so-called Original Six in later years. Separate deals were made in stocking the new teams. The rights to the Victoria Cougars' players were bought by the Detroit franchise (which would eventually become the Detroit Red Wings) causing the team to be named the Detroit Cougars in their honor, and the Portland Rosebuds' players' rights were purchased by Frederic McLaughlin for his new Black Hawks team. The New York Rangers did not come to any similar agreement with any team but they grabbed players from certain teams like the Saskatoon Sheiks with the Cook brothers, but never less, the Rangers were the most well rounded team of the three in its early years, including winning a