2000 NHL Expansion
Twenty-eight teams, one new blue army—Columbus finally had its NHL franchise.
The 2000 NHL Expansion was the league's move to 28 teams, adding the Columbus Blue Jackets and the Atlanta Thrashers to the existing 26-club roster. For Columbus, Ohio—a city of nearly 1.4 million that had long hungered for a major professional franchise—this was the moment the Blue Jackets were born, carrying a name drawn from the Union Army's storied 23rd Ohio Infantry Regiment, the 'Blue Jackets,' who wore their distinctive blue coats into the Civil War.
The expansion season of 2000-01 set the tone for a franchise built on patience and identity. Under founding owner Scott Howes, the club drafted goaltender Rick DiPietro first overall, hired Scott Hartnell as its inaugural head coach, and took the ice at the newly opened Nationwide Arena. The early years were defined by rebuilding, but the founding era planted the cultural roots—patriotic imagery, working-class pride, and a deep Ohio identity—that still define the Blue Jackets today.
- Team
- Columbus Blue Jackets
- Expansion Season
- 2000-01 NHL
- Founding Owner
- Scott Howes
- First Head Coach
- Scott Hartnell
- First Overall Draft Pick
- Rick DiPietro (2000 NHL Entry Draft)
- Home Arena
- Nationwide Arena, Columbus, Ohio
- Initial Conference & Division
- Western Conference, Central Division
Lore & Background
In the summer of 2000, the NHL's expansion process delivered a franchise to a city that had watched the sport from the outside for decades. The Blue Jackets' name was not chosen for fashion; it reached back to 1861, when the 23rd Ohio Infantry Regiment marched out of Columbus wearing blue wool coats that set them apart on the battlefield. That image—blue, red, white, and the silhouette of a soldier's coat—became the visual DNA of the franchise, a deliberate rejection of the generic 'city + animal' naming that had defined most expansion clubs.
The 2000-01 season was a baptism by fire. The Blue Jackets, placed in the Western Conference's Central Division, faced an uphill battle against established rosters. Their first overall pick, Rick DiPietro, a young goaltender from the New Jersey area, was expected to anchor a rebuild. Scott Hartnell, a former NHL player turned coach, led a young and inexperienced group through a season that would see them finish near the bottom of the standings. Yet the crowd at Nationwide Arena—cramped, loud, and fiercely loyal—treated every shift as a declaration of belonging.
The founding era also established the team's relationship with its city. Columbus was not a hockey metropolis in the traditional sense; it was a manufacturing and logistics hub, a place of blue-collar pride. The Blue Jackets leaned into that. The 'Jackets' identity, the patriotic color scheme, the community outreach—these were not marketing afterthoughts but the franchise's founding charter. By the mid-2000s, the team had become a civic institution, and the 2000 expansion was remembered not as a failure but as the first brick in a long wall.
In Their Own Story
The arena was half-empty when the first puck dropped. October, 2000. The ice still smelled of the chemical tang that new rinks carry, the boards not yet scuffed by a season of bodies. A kid in the third row clutched a blue-and-red scarf his dad had bought at the team store that morning, the one that hadn't existed a week ago. The crowd noise was thin, uncertain, the way a crowd sounds when it's still learning the rhythm of its own cheers. Then the puck hit the boards, a stick cracked, and someone in the stands—maybe the kid, maybe his dad—shouted a word that wasn't quite a word yet, just a sound that meant *this is ours now*. The season would be long and hard. But that first crack of the stick against the boards, that raw, unpolished noise of a city discovering its team, never left the memory of anyone who was there.
Reader's Guide
The 2000-01 expansion era is the Blue Jackets' origin story, and it matters because it defined what the franchise would never be: a generic, interchangeable NHL product.
What defined this chapter was identity. In a league where expansion teams often adopted animal names and generic color palettes, Columbus chose a Civil War regiment. The blue coat, the red trim, the white field—these were not arbitrary. They connected a modern hockey team to a 150-year-old Ohio story, and that connection became the emotional bedrock of fan loyalty.
The on-ice product was rough. The Blue Jackets finished their inaugural season near the bottom of the league, and the rebuild stretched for years. But the franchise's leadership under Scott Howes made a deliberate choice: build a team that reflected the city rather than chasing short-term wins. That patience, that commitment to a working-class, patriotic identity, is what separated the Blue Jackets from other expansion clubs and gave them a fanbase that showed up even in the worst seasons.
Why it matters today: every Blue Jackets jersey, every 'Jackets' chant, every reference to the 23rd Ohio traces back to this 2000 founding. The expansion wasn't just a league expansion; it was a city claiming a place in the NHL, and the identity forged in those first difficult seasons is still the heart of the franchise.
Did You Know?
- The Blue Jackets' name honors the 23rd Ohio Infantry Regiment, a Union Army unit that served in the Civil War and was nicknamed the 'Blue Jackets' for their distinctive blue wool coats.
- Columbus was one of two cities awarded an NHL expansion franchise for the 2000-01 season, the other being Atlanta, which received the Thrashers.
- The team's first overall selection in the 2000 NHL Entry Draft was goaltender Rick DiPietro, who was expected to anchor the franchise's rebuild from day one.
- The Blue Jackets were initially placed in the Western Conference's Central Division, a geographic oddity for an Ohio-based team that reflected the league's conference structure at the time.