NHL Founding Member 1917

Lore & Background

The story of the NHL's birth is often told as a Montreal story, and in many ways it was. The league was chartered in a city two hours by rail from Ottawa, and the Canadiens and Maroons would go on to dominate the sport for decades. But the Ottawa Senators were the connective tissue between the old world of amateur, semi-pro, and PCHA hockey and the new professional league. Their roster in 1917 was a patchwork of veterans and young guns who had already played together in the capital's long hockey tradition, and their presence gave the fledgling NHL a sense of continuity with the game's roots in the Ottawa Valley.

The three consecutive Stanley Cups from 1918 to 1920 were not merely wins; they were a statement that the new league could produce champions as formidable as any the old circuits had known. The 1920 final against the Vancouver Millionaires, played in a city that had never before hosted a Cup playoff, was a particular triumph: it proved the NHL could expand westward and still crown an eastern, original-six champion. For a few short years, the Senators were the face of the league, and the 'Founding Member' label carried the same weight it does today for any institution's first cohort.

The original franchise folded after the 1933-34 season, its assets absorbed into the St. Louis Eagles before vanishing entirely. Yet the 1917 founding membership never left the record books. When Ottawa received an expansion franchise in 1992, the club's very existence was a nod back to that November night in 1917, when the Senators' name was one of six written into the charter of a league that would become the world's premier professional hockey competition.

In Their Own Story

The November air in Montreal was sharp enough to crack the glass on the hotel windows. Six men sat around a table that smelled of cold coffee and pipe tobacco, and the man from Ottawa—broad-shouldered, with ice still drying on the cuffs of his coat—leaned forward and said, simply, 'We're in.' He did not raise his glass. He did not need to. The pen was already moving across the charter, and his club's name was third in the list, between the Maroons and the Blueshirts. Outside, the streetlamps were just coming on, and somewhere down the avenue a streetcar bell rang once, long and hollow, like a puck dropping into an empty net. He signed, set the pen down, and looked at the other five men as if to say: this is the league now, and we built it. The coffee was cold. Nobody cared. The NHL was real.

Reader's Guide

The NHL Founding Member designation is not a trophy or a statistical record; it is a constitutional status. On November 26, 1917, six clubs—Montreal Canadiens, Montreal Maroons, Quebec Bulldogs, Toronto Blueshirts, Ottawa Senators, and Winnipeg Falcons—agreed to form the National Hockey League as a unified professional body, replacing the patchwork of the PCHA, the NHA, and independent amateur circuits. Ottawa's inclusion was significant because the club had already won multiple Stanley Cups as an independent entity, giving the new league instant pedigree.

The immediate proof of that pedigree came in the first three seasons. In 1917-18, the Senators won the inaugural NHL championship and then captured the Stanley Cup. They repeated in 1919, defeating the Montreal Canadiens, and again in 1920, beating the Vancouver Millionaires in a final that carried the Cup to the Pacific coast for the first time. Three straight Cups in the league's first three years made Ottawa the standard-bearer of the new institution.

The significance of the founding-member status endures because it anchors Ottawa to the league's origin. No later expansion or re-entry can replicate that position. In the broader tapestry of NHL history, the 1917 charter is the document from which every subsequent season, rule change, and franchise descends, and the Senators' name on that document is the oldest thread in the fabric.

Did You Know?

• The original Ottawa Senators had already won Stanley Cups as an independent club before the NHL existed, meaning the league's first champion was a team that had been a champion for years before the league was born.
• The Winnipeg Falcons, the other founding member, played only a single NHL season (1919-20) before the league was suspended by World War I and the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic, making them the shortest-lived of the origin
• The 1920 Stanley Cup final pitted the Ottawa Senators against the Vancouver Millionaires, bringing the championship to the Pacific coast for the first time in the league's history.
• The original Senators franchise ceased operations after the 1933-34 season; the Ottawa name was not used in the NHL again until the 1992 expansion team was awarded the franchise.