The Original Six: The Real Story Behind Hockey's Most Famous Six Teams

The Original Six is the most repeated phrase in hockey history and one of the most misunderstood. Six franchises — Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Montreal, New York, and Toronto — spent twenty-five seasons as the entire National Hockey League, playing each other over and over until the rivalries burned permanent grooves into the sport.

Here's the part that surprises people: they were not the NHL's original six teams. Not even close.

This is what the Original Six actually was, where each identity came from, and why those six crests still outsell almost everything else in hockey.

The Name Is a Misnomer (and That's the Fun Part)

The NHL began play in 1917 with the Montreal Canadiens, the Montreal Wanderers, the Ottawa Senators, and the Toronto Arenas. A fifth franchise, the Quebec Bulldogs, was granted but did not ice a team that first season. The Wanderers' arena burned down weeks into the schedule and the club never recovered.

Of the six teams we now call "Original," only two trace back to that founding moment — Montreal, and the Toronto franchise that would eventually become the Maple Leafs. The other four all arrived in the mid-1920s, during the NHL's push into the United States.

So where does the name come from? Not from 1917. It comes from what happened in 1942.

The New York Americans suspended operations before the 1942–43 season, dropping the league to six clubs. And there it stayed — no additions, no relocations, no folds — for twenty-five consecutive seasons, until the 1967 expansion doubled the league overnight. "Original Six" is really a nickname for that frozen quarter-century, applied backwards.

Twenty-five years. Six teams. A schedule where you played the same five opponents fourteen times a season. That is how you manufacture the deepest rivalries in North American sport.

The Six, and Where Their Identities Came From

Montreal Canadiens — the genuine original

Founded in 1909, the Canadiens predate the NHL itself and are the oldest continuously operating professional hockey club in the world. The team was created explicitly to represent Montreal's French-speaking population, and that mandate shaped everything that followed. The famous "CH" is not a C for Canadiens and an H for Hockey — the H stands for Habitants, the source of the nickname Habs.

Montreal has won more Stanley Cups than any franchise in the sport, and it isn't close.

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Toronto Maple Leafs — three names in ten years

Toronto's franchise dates to the NHL's 1917 founding, but it took a while to settle. It began as the Toronto Arenas, became the Toronto St. Patricks in 1919 — playing in green — and only became the Maple Leafs in 1927, when Conn Smythe led the group that bought the club and immediately rebranded it.

Smythe's choice was deliberate: the maple leaf was the emblem worn by Canadian soldiers, and he wanted a name that meant something national rather than local. The blue-and-white identity has barely moved since.

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Boston Bruins — the first American club

Boston joined in 1924 as the first NHL franchise based in the United States, founded by grocery magnate Charles Adams. The brown-and-yellow color scheme was not a hockey decision at all — those were the colors of Adams' grocery store chain.

The name followed a similar logic. Adams wanted an animal that suggested size, ferocity, and cunning, and "Bruins" — an old term for a brown bear — fit both the temperament he wanted and the brown he was already committed to. The spoked-B came later and has become one of the cleanest marks in sports.

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New York Rangers — named after their own owner

The Rangers entered in 1926, and the origin of the name is one of hockey's better pieces of trivia. Madison Square Garden president George Lewis "Tex" Rickard was behind the new club, and the press promptly nicknamed it "Tex's Rangers" — a play on the Texas Rangers. The joke stuck and became the actual name.

The diagonal "RANGERS" wordmark across the chest is one of the sport's most recognizable sweater designs and has survived nearly a century essentially untouched.

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Chicago Blackhawks — a military namesake

Also a 1926 arrival, Chicago's name came from original owner Frederic McLaughlin's service in the U.S. Army's 86th Infantry Division during World War I — a unit known as the Blackhawk Division, itself named for the Sauk leader Black Hawk.

For most of its history the club spelled it as two words, "Black Hawks," and formally consolidated it to the single-word "Blackhawks" in 1986 — reportedly after someone noticed the original franchise documents had it as one word all along.

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Detroit Red Wings — the winged wheel

Detroit's franchise arrived for the 1926–27 season as the Detroit Cougars, became the Falcons in 1930, and was struggling badly when grain millionaire James Norris bought it in 1932.

Norris renamed the club the Red Wings and gave it the winged-wheel crest, drawing on his own past as a player for the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association — a club known as the Winged Wheelers. The imagery also landed perfectly in a city built on the automobile. It is one of the rare logos where the sport, the owner's history, and the city's identity all converge in a single mark.

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Why the Original Six Still Dominates Merch

Twenty-five years of playing nothing but each other did something no marketing department could replicate.

The identities stopped changing. Every one of these six crests is essentially locked. There's no rebrand risk, no new-era redesign to chase. A Bruins spoked-B or a Rangers diagonal works exactly as well in 1975, 2005, or today — which is why these are the designs people put on a hoodie they intend to keep for a decade.

The rivalries are inherited. Boston–Montreal, Toronto–Montreal, Chicago–Detroit: these aren't matchups fans chose, they're ones they were handed by a parent or grandparent. That is a fundamentally different kind of loyalty than picking a team as an adult, and it's why Original Six gear sells year-round rather than only when a club is good.

The color schemes are genuinely great. Six teams, six unmistakable palettes, none of them overlapping. Black and gold. Red, white, and blue. Red and white. Bleu-blanc-rouge. Blue and white. Red and white with a chrome wheel. You can identify all six from across a bar at a glance.

That combination — permanent design, inherited loyalty, strong color — is exactly why these six teams anchor the NHL Collection → and why they show up on more of our best-selling pieces than any other group of franchises.

Building an Original Six Wardrobe

Tanks are the summer and beer-league staple, and the classic color blocks translate unusually well to a sleeveless cut — heavy blocks of a single strong color, no fussy gradients. Start in Men's Hockey Tanks →.

Hoodies are where these crests do their best work, because the designs are built around a chest mark that a hood-and-pocket silhouette frames naturally. As arenas get cold again, this is the piece that carries an Original Six identity through the whole season. Browse Hockey Hoodies →, and if you're deciding between weights and fits, we broke that down here: Hockey Hoodies: The Complete Buying Guide →.

Retro cuts are the sleeper pick. The Original Six spent decades in sweater designs that have since been retired, revived, retired again — the St. Pats green, the older Blackhawks and Red Wings marks, the pre-modern Bruins bear. If your taste runs to what these teams looked like before the current era, that's the same instinct that drives the defunct-team world: NHL Defunct & Retro →.

Beyond the Six

Here's the honest caveat to all of this: the Original Six framing has flattened a lot of hockey history. Twenty-five years of six teams is a great story, but the sport before 1942 and outside the NHL entirely produced some of the best identities ever drawn — and most of them are gone.

The Montreal Maroons, the New York Americans, the Ottawa Senators of the 1920s, the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Quebec Bulldogs. Later, the Whalers, the Nordiques, the North Stars, the Golden Seals. Those franchises left behind crests that hold up against anything the Original Six ever wore, with the added appeal that almost nobody else in the room is wearing them.

We mapped that whole world out separately: Retro Hockey Apparel: A Fan's Guide to Defunct NHL Teams →.

The Bottom Line

The Original Six wasn't the NHL's first six teams — it was the six that survived the league's brutal early decades and then held the entire sport by themselves from 1942 to 1967. Two of them go back to 1917. Four showed up in the twenties. All six came out the other side with identities so settled that a century of redesign trends has barely touched them.

That's the whole reason they still work on a shirt.

Shop the NHL Collection → — all six, plus every current franchise.

Browse All Hockey Apparel → — NHL, AHL, ECHL, RHI, and every retro franchise in between.

Also read: Hockey Hoodies: The Complete Buying Guide → — weights, fits, and what actually lasts. | Retro Hockey Apparel: A Fan's Guide to Defunct NHL Teams → — the franchises that didn't make it.