For the last couple of years hockey logo fans have been wondering, will the Ottawa Senators stick with the “centurion” logo, will they switch full-time to the retro-inspired “O” or will they come up with something entirely new?
Well, did you ever consider “none of the above”?
SportsLogos.Net has learned the Ottawa Senators, faced with a fanbase which seems to be evenly split on which style of team logo they prefer, will instead forego using any traditional logo at all beginning with the 2020/21 season. Yes, you read me right, no logo.
In place of a logo, the Senators will instead use eleven alternating red, white, and black horizontal stripes, a nod to the uniforms the original Senators wore in the 1910s and 1920s. The eleven stripes represent the eleven Stanley Cup championships those first Sens teams won between 1903 and 1927.
“The Stanley Cup banners that hang over the ice of the Canadian Tire Centre honouring our city’s championship past have no logos whatsoever”, the source told me during a trip I took to Ottawa recently. “If no logo was good enough for those eleven Cup-winning teams, surely it’s good enough for us.”
Officially there will be no bounds to the design, the stripes go on infinitely. Realistically, of course, the stripes will be trimmed to fit whatever space they’ll be displayed in, but when used on official team merchandise the eleven stripes will wrap around in one continuous design from front to back, this includes the team jerseys, t-shirts, and caps.
“Horizontal stripes are such an important look to the history of hockey in Ottawa we decided to embrace it, to go all-in.”, the source continued. “In the past we’ve only used just a couple of stripes here-and-there and only on our third jerseys. There will be no more of that tip-toeing around the history, it was either we go big or just forget about it.”
The idea of a team not having any logo at all seems a little, unusual, at first but consider the Cleveland Browns who have never had a proper primary team logo, the NFL to this day still opting to instead assign a simple blank orange helmet graphic wherever a logo would usually be required. The NHL is on board and ready to accommodate this similar situation for their various applications.
Ottawa unfortunately missed the deadline to get their “no logo” change squared away in time for the upcoming 2019/20 season, the deadline for such changes passed several months ago; but as we sit here on April 1st everything is now approved and finalized, giving the team more than enough lead to have everything ready and set for 2020-21.
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