Leafs Merchandise: Is it New or Vintage? How to Tell Them Apart!

The Toronto Maple Leafs introduced a new logo for the upcoming 2016-17 NHL season, it’s a logo that looks an awful lot like one from the 1960s, one that appeared on a lot of “vintage” collection team merchandise over the past decade or so. This can pose a bit of a problem for those who want to make sure they’re getting merchandise featuring the brand new 2016 logo rather than the old-school logo from long ago.

But we’re here to help!

There are several subtle differences between the 1960s and 2016 logos, with our handy guide here you’ll be an old pro at spotting the differences in no time!

First here’s the two logos side-by-side:

Pretty similar, right? Yes, I know, there’s the outline on the ’64 logo, but you can’t always rely on that appearing on the vintage gear.

So outline aside, there are differences in how the wordmark is centred as well as how some of the letters are aligned, the type of font used, and both the amount and shape of the veins within the leaf.

Differences noted here:

At the top of this graphic we point out the elimination of the outline, below that you’ll notice the upper right group of veins is missing one in the new logo (each vein now represents a Stanley Cup victory, so one had to get cut).

The overall wordmark, now using rounded letters, is off-centre in the 1964 logo (note the spacing from the “O” to the edge on the left, versus on the right) but for me the easiest way to tell whether your logo is old or new is the position of the “M” in “Maple” and “L” in “Leafs”, if they don’t line up you’re looking at a vintage. If they line up perfectly, all new!

Finally, at the very bottom we see the veins are stylized differently, the ’16 logo features a couple of shorter rounder lumps while ’64 is more stretched out and flatter on the left.

Again, don’t rely on just the extra outline, as you can see from the vintage merchandise in the graphic below — some have the outline, others do not:

Like I mentioned earlier, look at the M’s and L’s — if they line up it’s new, if they don’t then it’s vintage.

We hope this helps!

Speaking of the Leafs… we’re running a contest to giveaway one free, customized new Toronto Maple Leafs jersey courtesy the Toronto Maple Leafs, awesome! To enter you just follow @sportslogosnet on Twitter and then RT the tweet below.

We’ll be picking our winner tomorrow (Sep 1/16) at 10am ET.

PRIZE! A brand new *customized* #Leafs jersey courtesy @MapleLeafs to one of our lucky followers who RT’s this tweet pic.twitter.com/USic1N5An2
— Chris Creamer (@sportslogosnet) August 31, 2016