Home: Ottawa, ON

Stadium: Ottawa Civic Centre (10,500)

Team synopsis: Franchise summed up the WHA, troubled from the start. Began the '75-'76 season in Denver, folded after 41 combined games between the two cities. Never even adopted a logo.

The simple statement that the Ottawa Civics were the shortest-lived franchises in the WHA just doesn't do the club justice. They never even had time to adopt an official logo, so there's no team photo in existence.

I'm not sure anyone knows where this logo came from, there's even a jersey floating around the internet that has this logo ... definitely not real .... They wore the old Denver Spurs jerseys, stripped of the crests, and lasted all of 15 days. Their hockey cards were the same for those players the year before in their previous jerseys, airbrushed.

The Civics were the WHA's second attempt at establishing a team in the Canada's capital. When the Nationals were moved to Toronto after the league's inaugural season, Ottawa would remain void until the middle of the '75-'76 season. Expansion into Denver at the beginning of the season turned out to be a dismal failure, and the club's owner, Ivan Mullenix bailed out of the horror story by selling the club to a group of Ottawa businessmen before Christmas.

Named after their home building - The Ottawa Civic Center, the team played its first game at home on January 2, 1976. But just as was the case in Denver, the team failed to produce results. Filling the rink to barely 1/3 capacity on average. Including Ralph Backstrom, the team was made up mostly of players picked up from the Chicago Cougars after their demise in the off-season. Their only real 'strong pont' was Bob Liddington and Rick Norris still supplied a blanced left wing attack. Lacking any sort of direction, which was the problem as well in Denver, the team was in the basement of every possible stat. When proper financing for a long-term stay fell through, the owners folded the team on Jan 17, 1976, after a combined 41 games as both the Denver Spurs and the Ottawa Civics.