Ottawa Civics

Lore & Background

The Ottawa Civics originated as the Denver Spurs, a team that began play in the Western Hockey League in 1968 and moved to the WHA in 1975. The Spurs were plagued by financial difficulties and poor attendance (fewer than 3,000 per game), attributed to Denver fans rejecting the WHA as a major league and rumors that the NHL planned to move either the Kansas City Scouts or the California Golden Seals to Denver. Owner Ivan Mullenix wanted out, and the league brokered a deal with an Ottawa group called the Founders Club, who insisted the team move to Ottawa immediately as a condition of negotiations.

While the Spurs were on a road trip in January 1976, the team was quietly moved to Ottawa without a press release and renamed the Civics. Players learned of the move at their next road game in Cincinnati, when they took the ice in their Denver jerseys, saw 'Civics' on the scoreboard, and heard O Canada played. They lost that night and the next in Houston, then won their only game on January 4 against the Minnesota Fighting Saints. The Civics played two home games at the Ottawa Civic Centre in front of sellout crowds, but the Founders Club could not meet Mullenix's asking price of $1.5 million, offering only $1 million. The team folded on January 17, 1976.

Reader's Guide

The Ottawa Civics are notable as the shortest-lived franchise in WHA history, existing for only two weeks and seven games. Their brief existence underscores the instability of the WHA and the challenges faced by teams competing with the NHL for markets and fan loyalty. The team's move from Denver to Ottawa was so rushed that the Civics never adopted a logo or colors, continuing to wear the Spurs' orange road uniforms for all seven games. The franchise's total of 41 games (including 34 as the Denver Spurs) makes it one of the shortest-lived in North American major league history, surpassed only by the Tonawanda Kardex Lumbermen of the American Professional Football Association in 1921. The last active Spurs/Civics player in the NHL was Ron Delorme, who retired after the 1984-85 season. Major league hockey eventually returned to Ottawa when the reborn Senators joined the NHL as an expansion team in the 1992-93 season.

Did You Know?

• The Ottawa Civics played only seven games, two at home, and existed for approximately two weeks.
• The team never adopted a logo or colors, wearing the Denver Spurs' orange road uniforms for all games.
• The Civics' only victory was a 5-2 win over the Minnesota Fighting Saints on January 4, 1976.

A Franchise in Transit

The Ottawa Civics arrived in 1976 as a team already in motion. What had been the Denver Spurs in the World Hockey Association was hastily transplanted to the nation's capital, rebranded, and dropped into a new city with what appears to have been minimal runway. The result was a franchise that managed only two home games in Ottawa before disbanding entirely. There was no full season to complete, no playoff run to follow, no local fan base to cultivate over the course of a campaign. The Civics existed as a name on a schedule for a matter of weeks, a ghost of a roster that passed through the capital without truly taking root. In the broader ledger of WHA history, they represent one of the league's most ephemeral entries—a team whose entire Ottawa tenure consisted of two games played under the lights of a civic arena, after which the franchise simply ceased to exist and the name vanished from the sport's map.

A Home Tucked Beneath the Grandstand

The Civics played their two Ottawa games at the facility then known as the Ottawa Civic Centre, a venue whose architecture tells its own story. Built in a frantic rush to meet the 1967 Canadian Centennial deadline, the arena was constructed directly beneath the north grandstand of the adjacent Lansdowne Park football stadium, with large steel girders shipped in by barge to support the overhanging roof. Its design is distinctive: most of the seating is concentrated on one side of the ice, an arrangement that later figure skating officials would praise as ideal for presentations. For the Civics, this meant a compact, intimate-feeling space where the crowd pressed close to the boards. The arena had opened barely a decade earlier, on December 29, 1967, with temporary seats borrowed from a nearby Coliseum building, and by 1976 it was a well-established part of Ottawa's sports landscape—home to the 67's, a venue for Canada Cup games, and a stage for national and world championships.

The WHA's Ottawa Experiment

The Civics were the second of two World Hockey Association franchises to attempt a foothold in Ottawa during the 1970s, and they fared worse than their predecessors. The Ottawa Nationals had arrived in 1972, played a full regular season, but ultimately moved their playoff games to Toronto before relocating permanently to become the Toronto Toros. The Civics, arriving three years later in 1976, never got that far. Where the Nationals at least completed a season and carried a degree of continuity from their original identity, the Civics were a hastily rebranded transplant from Denver that managed only two home games before the franchise dissolved. Neither team survived more than one season in the capital. Together, they represent a brief and ultimately failed experiment in bringing WHA hockey to Ottawa, a league whose franchises were in constant flux, and a city that would not see another major professional hockey team until the NHL's Ottawa Senators arrived in 1992.

A Footnote in a Long Line of Tenants

In the long chronicle of the arena that now bears the name TD Place, the Ottawa Civics occupy a single line in a very long list. The facility has been home to the Ottawa 67's since its 1967 opening, to the NHL's Ottawa Senators from 1992 to 1995, to the NLL's Ottawa Rebel in the early 2000s, and to the PWHL's Ottawa Charge beginning in 2024. It has hosted the first IIHF Women's World Ice Hockey Championships in 1990, multiple Canada Cup games, World Figure Skating Championships, and even the leadership conventions of four Canadian prime ministers. The Civics' two games in 1976 sit quietly among all of this—a brief, unremarkable entry in a venue that has since undergone major renovations, a string of one-year naming-rights deals, and decades of continuous use. The arena outlived the franchise by a wide margin, and the Civics remain a minor curiosity for hockey historians rather than a defining chapter in Ottawa's sports story.

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