Toronto’s new centre-ice logo for 2026-27 isn’t new. It’s the literal maple leaf the franchise wore in 1927, pulled out of storage and dropped back onto the ice at Scotiabank Arena, and it makes almost everything the Leafs have worn since look like a mistake somebody signed off on by accident.
The team revealed it during a livestream of the arena’s ice installation, the kind of low-key rollout usually reserved for parking-lot repaving, not a hundred-year rebrand. There was no press conference and no hype video, just cameras on the ice technicians and a logo nobody was told to expect.
https://x.com/Leafslatest/status/2100627353390960719
The 1927 logo is back exactly as it looked in 1927, no redesign and no reinterpretation, just a franchise reaching into its own closet and pulling the original back out.
This is the mark Toronto adopted when it renamed itself from the St. Pats and switched to blue and white ahead of the 1926-27 season, the first Maple Leaf the Maple Leafs ever wore. It stuck around until 1938, when the franchise smoothed it into the more symmetrical, condensed crest that carried the team for the next few decades. Ninety-nine years later, the uneven, hand-cut leaf and the vintage lettering still read cleaner than the logo it’s replacing.
I’ve spent enough years pricing out client logo briefs at freelance rates to know what most anniversary rebrands actually are: an excuse to bill more design hours for something that photographs the same as what came before. Toronto skipped the excuse and just took the good one out of the drawer.
The Leafs already tried the tribute version once, and it wasn’t this. For 2016-17, marking a hundred years since the franchise’s 1917 founding as the Toronto Arenas, the team commissioned an entirely new crest: 31 points on the leaf for 1931, when Maple Leaf Gardens opened, 17 veins for the founding year, 13 more at the top for the Stanley Cups they’d won by then. That’s a lot of numerology packed into a shape that’s supposed to read instantly from center ice.
Brendan Shanahan, team president at the time, said the goal was to get back to “our roots, when Conn Smythe first changed the team logo to the Maple Leaf in 1927.” It took Toronto another decade to actually do the thing its own team president described out loud.
Auston Matthews is captaining that jersey into the 2026-27 season, opening training camp this month with zero ambiguity about wanting to stay in Toronto long-term. He’s also fronting the best roster they’ve had since 1967, which makes this finally feel like a franchise whose branding matches its roster for the first time this century.
Compare that to the rest of the NHL’s offseason, where half the league is still workshopping some committee-approved crest that looks like a phone case pattern.
Somebody in that building owes every logo since 1938 an apology.
