Route 96 Kanata - Hockey Team Naming

OKAY. Hockey team naming. Canadian colonial history. The entire concept of quebec as a general idea.

Mostly this is about why The Boston Raiders and The Montreal Voyageurs are the superior names for hockey teams when drawing on both canon sources.

Boston: if we're looking at the Bruins as baseline then I see where RR was coming from with the Bears, an obvious 1:1, but it feels cheap. We're talking an original 6 team here. Let's give her some pizazz. Some history. There's some heft to the Bruin as an old dutch word, the overlap of brown and bear, all of it. The Boston Bears play kiddie league. They have no fight. That's where the Raiders come in. I like the Raiders as a name - it keeps the threat of violence and the reference to the feeling of something premodern. Like if you're worried about something outside your walls you're worried about Bruins and Raiders. So - I keep show canon here.

Being an original 6 team means being one of the six teams that had joined the NHL by 1926 (thank you wikipedia for the year) and survived through to WWII, where a lot of original teams (outside the 6) went defunct. For a very long time (until 1967, again thank you wiki), these original six teams were the only ones in the league. The six teams are: Montreal Canadiens, Toronto Maple Leafs, Boston Bruins, Chicago Black Hawks (change your name and logo fuckers), Detroit Red Wings and the New York Rangers. There's a lot of hockey mythology and cultural norms built around these teams that i simply do not have time to get into here.

MONTREAL: on the complete opposite side: the montreal team has to be a french word with too many syllables that has to be conjugated into male/female and impossible to spell for anglophones. the METROS? sir pray do tell me what was a metro in 1909? nothing. nonsense word. the paris subway had barely been open for like five years by then and the montreal system didnt go in until the 60s. you disgrace the history of hockey in montreal as you're trying to portray it. But here's where canadian history comes in, and I'm going to try to do the tightest tldr of all time on this so you guys can understand the choices i have made.

edit 2026-03-07: upon doing research for something else I have discovered the hockey team the Seattle Metropolitans, established 1911. Disbanded 1915. Seattle at the time had a population of approx 250k to Montreal's ~400k, so I can no longer in good faith claim that the hockey team Les Métropolitains/Métropols de Montréal was an ahistoric choice. I still hate it. It still means train system in my head.

Okay: Montreal's official NHL team are the Canadiens (note the french spelling) but almost everyone calls them "the habs". They're one of the oldest professional sports teams on the continent, and the oldest team in the NHL (one of the only teams (the only team? unclear) that predates the actual founding of the NHL). The habs is short for "Les Habitants" which just means "the inhabitants" in english. this is also what the original french settlers of canada (circa 16th/17th century) were called "les habitants". why the canadiens are nicknamed the habs is kind of vague to me - seems to be bc of some confusion about the canadiens logo having a C (canadiens) and an H (hockey) but if someone knows better than me please soundoff in the comments. The important thing here is that the nickname (habs) of the team (canadiens) is a term for a historically older and more rugged group of people than the actual team name.

ANYWAYS: A Voyageur is a man in the who would go out into the wilderness to go fur trapping. A vouageur was a licensed, professional, extremely dangerous, career that came about as a direct result of the fur trade being very very prominent in Canada's colonial history. Probably the most prominent thing The requirement that a voyageur be licenced was a direct result of the existence of what were known as coureurs des bois (lit: woods runner/runner of the woods). These were french, or mixed-heritage french/indigenous (metis), men who would go extremely far distances in individual or team canoes to bring furs back to montreal to be shipped to europe. the c-d-b were kind of mythical figures in canadian history - too intertwined with local indigenous groups and too independent for the monarchy to be comfortable with them (thus, the licensed voyageur), the men who chose that profession were typically viewed as sort of rugged lawless figures, the cowboy of the american west is a similar vibe with a totally different history. the c-d-b is extremely deeply linked with the Canadien (french canadian settler, previously known as habitant), identity and culture all throughout Canada as it is now known. so a 'coureur des bois' is an older and more historic (and more romanticized in modern mythmaking) version of a voyageur. Just like a habitant is to a canadien.

and thats why there's a two-off line to the mtl voyageurs referred to as "the cours" by Jackie Pike in this fic. I cant do something that clever with the fuckin METROS now can I? no. I cant.

we love fanfiction. i am so mad this fic is on anon and this detail cant be ported to all my other hollanov fics. im obsessed with it. someone make this fanon so i can use it without giving myself away.

The centaurs will still be the centaurs because i think it's sooo fucking funny that they can still be the cens instead of the Senators/Sens. does itc make any sense (haha, sense, cens, sens, get it?) in a historic or geographic or parallel context? no. but its funny and thats what matters. I would also accept something political if the show really is going to rename them. The Generals was one of the original names of the Ottawa hockey team from the 1890s so that could be fun. wow you can learn so much on wikipedia. god the classic jersey is so much better than the modern one. bring it back @ whoever replaced melnyk after he croaked