What if the Original Senators Never Folded?

[RAIDERNATION]

wow dude nice really really good!

[NorthStar74]

OH wow that is the best atuff to see... impressive work and I like how the Senators evolved over the years with the jersey looks and more.. great work!!

[hockey week]

1 - Instead of granting expansion franchises to the Buffalo Sabres and the Vancouver Canucks (of the PCHA), the league merges with the PCHA, taking in the Vancouver Canucks, Seattle Totems & Denver Spurs (who were both granted a conditional NHL franchise for the 1976-77 season which never happened), the Phoenix Roadrunners (who in reality joined the WHA with the afforementioned Spurs), Portland Buckaroos, and San Diego Gulls. The WHA wouldn't get off the ground, and Buffalo doesn't get it's expansion team in 1970 (though they would get one through relocation in the 80s or 90s. There is no Oilers, Whalers, Jets, or Nordiques, either.

There were never formal talks of a merger with the WHL (I goofed and forgot that the league changed their name from the PCHA to the WHA somewhere in the 1950s. However, the San Fransisco Seals joined the NHL from the WHL in 1967, and the Canucks joined in 1970. The Seattle Totems and Denver Spurs were supposed to join as expansion franchises in 1976, so that would have just about amounted to a merger over time. The Phoenix club was fairly successful after jumping to the WHA (If you check the logos for the Phoenix Roadrunners in the WHA section on this site, there is one logo that is actually from their days in the WHL - the colors were blue and gold in the WHA, but orange and aqua in the WHL). The Los Angeles Blades (who had Willie O'Ree at the time) were just beat out by the owner of the LA Forum in their bid for the 1967 expansion. A merger with the WHL would have made more sense in 1970 than the merger with the WHA did later on.

4 - The Blackhawks don't block the bid to relocate the Ottawa Senators to Chicago to become the Chicago Shamrocks.

In 1931, the Senators owners were prepared to sell the team to investors from Chicago. The Blackhawks blocked the proposed relocation, and the Senators ended up going to St. Louis in 1934 (interestingly enough, the Blackhawks owners also owned the arena in St. Louis, and they were behind the creation of the St. Louis Blues in 1967, even though St. Louis didn't put up a formal expansion bid. The sixth team should have gone to either Vancouver or Baltimore).

As far as the NHL's feud with Eddie Livingstone, there is a ton of information on it. I have learned to stop hating on Wikipedia and accept it, and there is quite a bit of information there. I usually click through the links at the bottom of the page to get to actual sources, and the new Google news feature which allows you to read newspaper articles from archives is pretty handy as well. Here's the basic storyline - in 1914, Eddie Livingstone bought the Toronto Ontarios and renamed them the Toronto Shamrocks. In 1916, he buys the Toronto Blueshirts as well (the team that would later become the Maple Leafs). The league doesn't want one person owning two teams, and there is also a dispute where one of his players was at the bedside of a dying father, and the league promised to reschedule a game. Near the end of the season, when it came time to replay that game, the league didn't honor that request, and Livingstone was furious. There was also a dispute when Livingstone's Shamrocks became the 228th Battalion and half his team had to go fight WWI.

Anyhow, the league pulled the plug on Livingstone, and basically blackballed him from professional hockey. He sold off the Shamrocks and kept the Blueshirts, but the league allowed most of his players to leave (most of them ended up in Seattle, and helped the Mets win the cup). Livingstone was eventually stripped of that club as well, and the team was sold to the company that owned the Arena (Hence the Toronto Arenas). In 1918, Livingstone got Percy Quinn, who owned the Quebec Bulldogs to secede from the NHL and reform the NHA. The Canadiens, Senators, and Wanderers were still voting members of the NHA and blocked that as well. The NHL took control of the Quebec Bulldogs and relocated them to Hamilton to block Livingstone's first attempt at setting up a rival league. Another attempt to start a rival league caused the NHL to grant an expansion team to Pittsburgh in 1925. Later on, the American Hockey Association declared itself a major league, rivaling the NHL, who declared it an "outlaw league". I haven't found any actual evidence that Livingstone had anything to do with this (this would have been 1930-1932), but the Chicago Shamrocks were merged with the Detroit Falcons to become the Red Wings. (most sites call this a merger, when really, James Norris disbanded the Shamrocks and took the three best players to Detroit with him. He chose the logo for the Red Wings based on the similarity to the Montreal AAA logo of the old AHAC). I suspect Livingstone may have owned the Shamrocks before Norris, but the name may just be a coincidence, and I haven't found anything to back that up yet.

Right now, for my project, I have 25 different scenarios, from the AHAC allowing the Ottawa Nationals to join in 1897 (the Senators, Bulldogs, and Montreal Victorias would have founded the CAHL as a rival league to the AHAC) all the way up to the current contingency plan to sell the Coyotes to True North Holdings in Winnipeg (probably not going to happen, though I have my fingers crossed) if Ice Edge can't negotiate a lease on the Jobing arena. I'm working on some concept art, which I'll be posting here soon, and hope to have the blog up and running sometime this summer.

The Saskatoon scenario requires a lot of speculation. But most of the other scenarios are pulling teams with existing histories into the NHL, so not too much different from what you did with the Senators and Maroons.

Really fascinating stuff, especially the WHL/PCHA stuff. It makes perfect sense, and I think I'm going to delve into that a bit. I knew that Livingstone's antics caused the NHA successions that formed the NHL, but I had no idea he was still active afterwards. I'll be looking into some of these sweater designs, as far as I can tell, Quebec had 2 (a barber pole and the QUEBEC chest stripe) and the Wanderers only had 1, hopefully there'll be some documentation of these teams. Thanks!

As for your blog, I really hope you go through with it. I'm a huge fan of alternate history, and you really know your stuff. I hope whenever it comes to fruition, you post it on here.

[hockey week]

Third String Goalie just featured these concepts on his blog http://thirdstringgoalie.blogspot.com/2012/04/what-if-original-ottawa-senators-never.html

Right around the same time, I found my O-Peace Tower logo used in a hockeyjerseyconcepts.blogspot.com post

http://hockeyjerseyconcepts.blogspot.com/2012/01/ahl-outdoor-jerseys-islanders-addition.html

I certainly never expected to go back to this concept for anything, and certainly never expected it to be used again, but hey, if it can happen to me, it can happen to anybody.

[Raymie]

That seriously looks like a workable identity, getting the "Roman" concepts out of there. I do love the logo you created and wish someone would create it at larger size and with more detail.

[New York's Greatest]

Excellent work!

[IceCap]

Do not bump old threads.