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The players, led by Burch and teammate Shorty Green, told the team they wouldn't dress for the Stanley Cup playoffs unless each received a cash bonus of $200. To justify their demands, they pointed to the increasing length of the season, the rumored record profit turned by the team that year, and the bonuses and wage increases being handed out by other NHL teams.

"Billy and I warned them there could be no drawing back," Green recalled years later. "We told them it was a case of all going into the playoffs together or all going out together... (NHL president Frank) Calder threatened us with fines, suspensions and a suit for damages."

When the player's refused to capitulate, the NHL suspended the Tigers for the playoffs. The showdown would cost Burch his only chance at winning a championship.

That summer, the Hamilton franchise was sold for $75,000 to a New York mobster named Bill Dwyer. The Tigers became the nucleus of the New York Americans. With a fortune made in Prohibition bootlegging, Dwyer handed out lucrative contracts, including a three-year deal to Billy Burch rumoured to be worth $25,000.

A local boy, league MVP and Hollywood-handsome in his stars-and-stripes Americans' sweater, Burch became the marquee attraction at Madison Square Garden. Dwyer and his partner, Tex Rickard, erected a sign at the arena urging New Yorkers to come see "Yonkers" Billy Burch, "The Babe Ruth of Hockey." A credulous local media quickly picked up the tag. He was named team captain and led the team in scoring with 22 goals. But the Americans were a shadow of the team that had stormed through the NHL the year before, and missed the playoffs.

The ludicrous "Babe Ruth" nickname proved too much to live up to. Novice hockey fans would howl in protest whenever Burch passed the puck or took anything other than a direct route to the net. In subsequent seasons his productivity declined, although he remained one of the top scorers on a poor team. The Americans made just one brief playoff appearance during the Burch years. In 1933 Burch was sold to Boston, then traded to Chicago. He retired after breaking a leg near the end of that season.

When he died in 1950, the Montreal Gazette noted that Burch was one of the few players to win both the Hart Trophy as NHL MVP and the Lady Byng Trophy as the league's "most gentlemanly and effective player." It was a remarkable achievement in what the Gazette called "a rough and tumble era in which the happy warriors mixed butt-ends, knees and elbows with their puckchasing with reckless abandon, and in which many of them played just as hard off the ice as on it."

Burch was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame in The New York Americans folded in 1942. In their 16 year existence they never made it to the Stanley Cup final.