Red and Black

Lore & Background

The story of Red and Black begins long before the modern arena. The original Ottawa Senators, established in 1883, were among the founding forces of organized hockey in North America. In the first decade of the 1900s, the club captured multiple Stanley Cups and built a reputation as a hard-hitting, proud team representing the nation's capital. The red and black colors were chosen to reflect the seriousness and grit of the franchise, a deliberate contrast to the more ornate palettes of rival clubs. When the original club folded in the 1920s, the identity did not die; it became a sleeping legend whispered through generations of Ottawa families, a story told at kitchen tables and in bar back rooms, waiting for the day the name would return to the NHL.

That day came in 1992, when the league granted Ottawa an expansion franchise. The new Senators inherited the colors, the crest, and the weight of a century of expectation. The return of the team to the NHL was met with a wave of civic pride that transformed the city: red and black bunting appeared on lampposts, fans draped scarves over their shoulders on the streets of downtown Ottawa, and the old rivalry with Montreal was reignited with a ferocity that had only grown in the years of absence. The colors became a unifying thread between the old-guard fans who remembered the original club and a new generation discovering what it meant to be a Sens supporter.

The 2007 Stanley Cup victory gave the Red and Black identity its modern coronation. For the first time since the original dynasty, an Ottawa team lifted the Cup, and the celebration spilled across the capital in a flood of crimson and charcoal. The moment cemented the colors not just as a team's livery but as a living, breathing part of Ottawa's cultural fabric—worn with pride, defended with passion, and passed down like a family heirloom.

In Their Own Story

The arena is half-full when the lights dim. A low murmur rolls across the stands, the kind of sound that builds like a wave before it breaks. Then the first note of the anthem hits, and the roar swallows it whole. A woman in the 200-level section pulls a red-and-black scarf from her bag, drapes it over her shoulders, and grips the railing. Beside her, a boy of maybe eight holds a foam finger painted in the same two colors, his eyes wide and fixed on the ice where the skaters are lacing up. The puck drops. A stick cracks against it, sharp as a gunshot, and the boy jumps. The woman laughs, not at him, but at the memory of her own first game, thirty years ago, when the team had just come back and the whole city felt like it was holding its breath. The red and black is not just a color. It is a promise kept across decades, a thread stitched from 1883 to this moment, and the boy will carry it forward without even knowing the weight of it.

Reader's Guide

Canadian Tire Centre, nestled in the Kanata suburb of Ottawa, is a modern NHL facility with a capacity in the range of 18,000 to 20,000 spectators. The arena features a large central video board, a concourse-level fan shop stocked in red and black, and a seating bowl that wraps tightly around the ice, keeping the crowd close to the action. The ice surface is standard NHL dimensions, and the boards are painted in the team's signature crimson and charcoal.

Game-day rituals are as much a part of the experience as the play itself. Fans arrive early, gathering in the concourse to trade stories about past seasons and the legendary original Senators. Before the puck drop, the stands erupt in a coordinated wave of red-and-black scarves raised overhead, a visual tide that rolls from one end of the arena to the other. During high-pressure moments—especially in rivalry games against Montreal—the crowd swells into a sustained, chest-thumping roar that the players have described as a physical force on the ice.

The team weaves itself into Ottawa's civic identity in ways that go beyond sport. The Senators' colors appear on local businesses, in school spirit days, and in the city's public celebrations. The franchise is a point of civic pride in a capital city that values heritage and continuity, and the red-and-black identity is treated less like a sports brand and more like a municipal emblem, worn with the same quiet dignity as the city's own symbols.

Did You Know?

• The original Ottawa Senators were founded in 1883, making them one of the oldest continuously recognized professional hockey clubs in North American history, predating the NHL itself by decades.
• The modern Senators' 2007 Stanley Cup win was the franchise's first championship in the modern NHL era, ending a wait that stretched back through the original club's early-1900s dynasty.
• The rivalry between the Ottawa Senators and the Montreal Canadiens is one of the oldest and most storied in professional hockey, stretching back to the very first decades of organized play in the early 1900s.
• The red-and-black color scheme was carried forward from the original 1883 club into the 1992 expansion team, preserving a visual identity that spans more than a century of hockey history.