Cape Breton Oilers

The Cape Breton Oilers are the highest level hockey team to inhabit Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. They were originally the Nova Scotia Oilers, playing out of the Halifax Metro Centre from 1984-88. The team moved to Sydney, Nova Scotia, for the 1988-89 season and were a hit, attracting upwards of 4,000 fans in a city that has a population of only 30,000 today. 

The Cape Breton Oilers spent eight seasons in Sydney, with the high water mark being a Calder Cup win in 1993. Interestingly, that team didn't even feature a ton of future NHL stars. They were led in scoring by Dan Currie and Bill McDougall, who combined for less than 50 NHL games. The team still did have big league talent though, as Shaun Van Allen, Kirk Maltby, and Scott Thornton played significant time for Cape Breton that year. 

By the mid-90s, the excitement waned a bit in Sydney, as a casino opened nearby and the Canadian economy as a whole was struggling (this is around the time Winnipeg moved to Phoenix). Those were the reasons given when the team relocated to Hamilton and became the Hamilton Bulldogs in 1996, but in reality, a new state of the art arena in a city the size of Hamilton was probably a large part of the appeal to move the team.