Illustration by Britt Spencer
It’s all rather complicated.
The team was born in Ottawa in 1883, when fans pelted opposing teams with lemons and got splashed with ice melt on warm days. The Ottawa Hockey Club won the Stanley Cup in challenges (the contest was structured differently back then) in 1903, 1904, 1905, 1906, 1909, 1910, and 1911, earning the nickname The Silver Seven. (In 1906, Ernie “Moose” Johnson—who carried a stick so long, it gave him a 99-inch reach—knocked the top hat off the governor-general.)
In 1917, the team joined the National Hockey League (known as the National Hockey Association till 1917). Called the Ottawa Senators by that time, the club came back to win the Stanley Cup again—in 1920, 1921, 1923, and 1927, becoming the NHL’s first dynasty. The Senators would be selected by Canadian sports editors as the nation’s greatest team for the first half of the 20th century.
Alas, Ottawa was a relatively small market at the time, and when the NHL expanded to include its southern neighbor, some of the fans lost interest. Broke, the Senators left the ice in 1931, sold off their best players, returned but finished in last place for two straight seasons.
To pay off $60,000 in losses, the team moved to St. Louis and was reborn as the Eagles, in honor of a certain beer logo. (Prohibition had just ended.) This was a coup, because St. Louis—then the seventh-largest city in the U.S.—had nonetheless been denied an NHL franchise two years earlier; travel to the Midwest was deemed too expensive during the Great Depression. There was already a pro hockey team in St. Louis, the Flyers, but they were begged not to protest the new arrivals.
The Eagles played here for one season, 1934–35. The players wore patriotic red-white-and-blue uniforms rather than the famous barbershop-striped red-black-and-white of the early days. Oddly, instead of having the team join the American Division, the league kept the Senators in the Canadian Division, and all that expensive travel punched a big hole in their budget. Again, they finished last in their division. Georges “Buck” Boucher took over as head coach, and the team did a little better, but attendance wasn’t strong. This time, they sold off all of the players.
After the Senators’ brief and not-so-shiny season, St. Louis waited 32 years for an NHL team. The Blues arrived with the 1967 expansion—and this year, they came from last place to win their first Stanley Cup.
