A promoter’s second club for the Garden and a nickname from the press box.

The New York Rangers were created by Madison Square Garden. English Wikipedia says the Garden’s president, George Lewis “Tex” Rickard, was awarded an NHL franchise for the 1926–27 season after the New York Americans, who had begun playing at the Garden a season earlier, did better than expected. The New York Times, in an F.Y.I. column by Ed Boland Jr. published on 16 February 2003, gave the same sequence: the success of the Americans prompted the league to allow Madison Square Garden to franchise another team, the New York Rangers, and the two clubs became rivals in the same building.

The name was settled in a meeting room. According to Wikipedia, the club was incorporated as the “New York Giants Professional Hockey Club” at a league meeting with NHL president Frank Calder on 17 April 1926, and during that same meeting the name was changed to “New York Rangers Hockey Club.” Wikipedia credits the nickname to George Haley, sports editor of the New York Herald Tribune, who called the new team “Tex’s Rangers” because Rickard had brought it to the city.

That artwork did not last. Wikipedia describes the earliest crest proposal as a rearing horse, sketched in blue, carrying a cowboy who waved a hockey stick, with the word “TEX’S” in a crescent at the top and “RANGERS” below. Rickard rejected it, and management settled on a shield similar to the one used by the Americans, with “NEW YORK” running horizontally across the top and “RANGERS” written diagonally from top left to bottom right. That slanted word carried over to the front of the solid blue sweaters, and Wikipedia says the classic sweater has been in use, with alterations, since the club’s founding.

The team’s early years at the old Garden on 49th Street, a few blocks from Times Square, also produced a lasting nickname. Wikipedia says that during this period the club became known as “The Broadway Blueshirts.”

From the Garden to Gulf+Western, Cablevision and MSG Sports.

Wikipedia names Sonny Werblin as Madison Square Garden’s owner by the late 1970s, and says that by the early 1990s the club was owned by Gulf+Western, which was renamed Paramount Communications in 1989. When Viacom acquired Paramount, it sold the team in August 1994 to ITT Corporation and Cablevision; ITT later sold its stake to Cablevision.

The corporate structure has been reshaped several times since. The Wikipedia article on Madison Square Garden Sports says that in 2010 Cablevision spun off the Rangers, the Knicks, the Garden itself and the MSG Network as an independent, publicly traded company. In 2015 the sports and entertainment business was split into a new company called the Madison Square Garden Company, and in 2020 that company became Madison Square Garden Sports Corp. and spun off its entertainment arm. Madison Square Garden Sports owns the Rangers today, with James L. Dolan as chairman, and the team shares the Garden and the same corporate parent with the New York Knicks.

The sweater has changed more slowly than the owners. Wikipedia says the uniform was originally light blue and switched to a darker shade, known as “Broadway Blue,” in 1929, and that red pants have been worn with it since the 1929–30 season. The earliest lettering had neither serifs nor a drop shadow. In 1946–47 the word “RANGERS” was arched above the sweater number, and the following season it returned to the diagonal in the form still used: a serif “RANGERS” with a red and white drop shadow on the blue sweater, and blue with a red drop shadow on the white sweater introduced in 1951–52.

One attempt to replace the classic look was short. Under general manager John Ferguson Sr., the club unveiled a modernised set for the 1976–77 season, with rounded numbers, a darker blue and the shield logo on the front; Wikipedia says it was unpopular with fans and was dropped after 1977–78.

Design and documentation.

A hockey sweater carries its identity in a few fixed places. The crest sits square on the chest, sized to read from the upper rows of an arena and on a broadcast frame, so it tends to be built from heavy shapes, thick outlines and a small number of flat colours. Twill and embroidery limit fine detail, which pushes designers towards bold letterforms and simple silhouettes rather than thin lines or gradients.

Shoulder patches give a second, smaller mark room to work, often a secondary logo, a monogram or a city reference. Sleeve and hem stripes repeat the colour order in bands, and numbers and nameplates on the back usually follow a block or arched lettering style that has to stay legible at speed and from a distance.

Away from the sweater, the same marks travel onto rink graphics: centre-ice logos painted beneath the surface, dasher-board panels, scoreboards, tickets and arena signage. For a designer studying a hockey identity, the useful exercise is to look at how one crest holds up across all of these sizes, from a small pin or patch to centre ice.

A shield, a slant and a statue.

The Rangers identity has two main marks: the shield crest and the diagonal wordmark on the front of the sweater. The shield, with “NEW YORK” across the top and “RANGERS” on a slant, dates from the club’s founding. When the team did change the word, it kept the angle: Wikipedia says that from 1978 to 1987 the blue sweater, then worn on the road, carried “NEW YORK” diagonally across the front instead of “RANGERS.” The 1978 set also added a V-neck collar in a red-white-red pattern and bolder stripes on the sleeves and waist. In 1997 the club restored the older striping and lace-up collar, and the design moved to the Reebok Edge template in 2007.

A further departure was an alternate. From 1996 to 2007, Wikipedia records, the Rangers wore a navy sweater showing the head of the Statue of Liberty, with the abbreviation “NYR” below in a futuristic script and silver as an accent colour. The “Lady Liberty” design returned, with changes to the striping, on Adidas “Reverse Retro” uniforms in 2020–21 and 2022–23.

Later specials kept the slant. For the 2024 Stadium Series the club wore white sweaters with an enlarged diagonal “NYR” in red with blue drop shadows. A navy third sweater introduced in 2023–24 brought the shield back as the main crest. Ahead of the 2025–26 season the team unveiled a centennial sweater based on the 1926–27 uniform: a light blue base with red and cream stripes, a sans-serif “RANGERS” running diagonally, and a 100th-anniversary patch on the left shoulder, Wikipedia says. A cream version with a diagonal sans-serif “NEW YORK” was prepared for the 2026 Winter Classic.

For a design guide, New York Rangers shows how a lettering angle can become the identity itself, surviving changes of word, typeface and colour. Compare the NHL, the Toronto Maple Leafs and the New York Knicks. For this guide we use Broadway blue, Garden red and shadow white with a high-contrast serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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