NHL logo rankings No. 12: Florida Panthers

To the shock of some people – including a couple THN staffers – our logo rankings have the Florida Panthers' logo ahead of the Montreal Canadiens' logo. What do you think of the Panthers' logo?

The Florida Panthers have drastically revamped their team for the coming season. However, in THN’s 2014 NHL logo ranking contest, their logo – which hasn’t changed much at all in their 21-year existence – fared well among our in-house panel of judges. They ranked the Panthers’ current logo 12th-best.

Do you think you could improve on the Panthers’ logo? If so, create one and submit it to editorial@thehockeynews.com. Once our logo rankings conclude, we’ll share them online.

HISTORY OF THE PANTHERS LOGO

(All logos from Chris Creamer’s website.)

The Panthers joined the NHL in 1993 and had their name selected in a fan voting contest. The choice in animal was connected to the Florida panther, an endangered species cougar known to inhabit swamps in South Florida. And their first choice in logo has proven to be such a hit, it’s essentially stayed the same ever since.

The Panthers kept their original logo until 1999, when they moved to the logo they still use today. If you can spot any differences other than the darker shades of blue and red, you’re more perceptive than us:

The Panthers experimented with alternate logos such as this one from 1993:

And this one from 2009:

As well as this secondary logo – the only one in team history that doesn’t feature some version of a panther on it:

But the Panthers’ main logo has remained intact from the original.

Dissenting opinion: “Maybe it’s the years of losing and mismanagement that have hurt the Panthers’ logo in my eyes, but when I look at it, all I see is a panther. There’s nothing else that says Florida here, and if you didn’t know the history of the animal and its relation to the region, you’d never see why it makes sense. Ranking this logo ahead of the Canadiens’ logo is a decision that made me scratch my head at the time, and I’m still scratching it now.” – Adam Proteau

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Think you can do a better job with a Panthers logo? Try your hand at designing a new and improved logo, using whichever color scheme you think looks best. Submit your creation to editorial@thehockeynews.com; we’ll post the best ones after our ranking of all 30 NHL logos is complete.