The One Where Friends Rewrites NHL Logo History

An unexpected but intriguing question was asked on my Twitter account this morning: Why does the New York Rangers‘ “Statue of Liberty” logo appear in an episode of Friends from 1994?

The scene in question takes place at Madison Square Garden during the fourth episode of the show’s premiere season. The characters attend a Rangers-Penguins game and briefly appear on the arena scoreboard after they end up with a puck. At first glance, it looks like a standard shot, that is, until you look a little closer.

@sportslogosnet watching Friends season 1 (1994) Ep 4, and they show a shot of the scoreboard at MSG and the lady Liberty logo is on the side, didn't this not come out for 2 more years @NYRangers pic.twitter.com/oYTMN4LvTb
— Mike Monaghan (@lifewithmikey52) December 17, 2025

On the side of the scoreboard is the Rangers’ Statue of Liberty logo, a mark that wouldn’t be introduced for another two years, part of the league’s hard push for clubs to introduce third uniforms. The Rangers joined the trend one season after the league’s infamous rollout of the program in January 1996, which produced such one-and-doners as the Los Angeles Kings’ “Burger King” jersey and the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim’s “Wild Wing” design. As far as I knew, this Rangers logo did not exist in any capacity before that time, but I theorized it was possible the club used it internally, and I simply didn’t notice.

Naturally, I was curious.

As I spent more time studying the screenshot from Friends (and bugging Clark Rasmussen of DetroitHockey.Net about it), the scoreboard itself started to feel out of place for the mid-1990s. The technology, layout, typography, and overall graphic treatment all appeared far more modern than what NHL teams were using at the time. We also noticed that on the edges of the scoreboard was what looked to be a Toronto Maple Leafs logo, and below it a graphic resembling an intentionally obscured Toronto Raptors secondary logo, a design that wouldn’t exist until 2008.

At that point, we were well beyond 1994.

Rasmussen suggested the Leafs/Raptors lockup looked like part of a Toronto Star newspaper masthead. Adding to that suspicion were the gold-coloured seats visible behind the scoreboard, which closely resembled those used at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre.

“To the archives!” I shouted to no one.

Digging through my own photo collection, I found an image I took at a Leafs-Sabres game at the Air Canada Centre in November 2009. It was a perfect match. The same Toronto Star ad placement featuring Leafs and Raptors logos, the same scoreboard structure, and the same graphic layout. The only notable difference was a Rangers Statue of Liberty logo added to the side to better sell the New York setting.

Of course, it was quite clear by now that this was not a 1994 Madison Square Garden scoreboard at all. It was actually Toronto’s Air Canada Centre (which didn’t even exist in 1994) from sometime around the late 2000s or early 2010s.

To rule out any remaining mystery, we needed to see what the scene originally looked like. Rasmussen had access to an older DVD release of the episode, and when we watched the same moment, the difference was immediate. The original shot featured a much more era-appropriate scoreboard, and, crucially, no Statue of Liberty logo. There was no Raptors logo either.

So what happened?

It appears that during Friends’ remastering process for Blu-ray and later 4K broadcasts, the original scoreboard footage was replaced. Likely due to image quality limitations, the production substituted a much newer arena scoreboard, unintentionally crashing the New York Rangers’ logo timeline.

So no, this wasn’t a case of time travel, and Friends didn’t predict the future of sports branding. It’s simply the result of modern edits layered onto a 1994 scene, creating a visual timeline that never actually existed.