zubazpirate

I think if I was a fan I'd be more annoyed that my Mississauga-branded merch was now out of date as opposed to having to drive a few extra kilometres to attend games.

I'm in Winnipeg and we recently went through a brief spell of having the WHL in town. Despite being an extremely successful team with several elite prospects, it struggled to gain any kind of a following. There were many nights where the Ice played to crowds of under 1,000 people. They just could not find any real traction. With the NHL and AHL already well established in a smaller city, there just wasn't much of a market for a relatively unknown junior product despite the fact that they had an excellent product at a great price. What this tells me is that in most cities, you will find maybe one or two flagship teams with large, passionate fanbases that kind of carry the flag for the entire city, they are the focal point for civic pride when it comes to sport. So the Oilers in Edmonton, the Tiger-Cats in Hamilton, the Wanderers in Halifax, the Knights in London, etc. Then you have maybe a second tier of a couple teams that have smaller but still passionate fanbases. Examples of "mid" teams might be, say, the Hitmen in Calgary, the Sea Bears in Winnipeg, the Argos in Toronto, the U of S Huskies in Saskatoon. Once you get below that you are down to the teams that are kind of floundering without much of a devoted fanbase at all. I'm thinking like Valour in Winnipeg, the Steelheads, the Scarborough Shooting Stars, the U of C Dinos, etc. The bottom line is that the seventh or eighth most popular sports team in any city, whether it's Winnipeg or Toronto, is going to look pretty lame in terms of fan support.

Completely agree. AFAIK they are the only high-profile North American hockey team that has a strong tie to pink elements in their identity. Why not lean into it?

Victoria's new thirds look NHL-calibre to me. Kamloops, on the other hand, looks like something you'd see at the 11 pm beer league.

I wonder why the Bombers went with the whites every year for four years straight, regardless of whether the Grey Cup was in the East or West?

^ Agreed On a related note, I don't think Gretzky in his prime got as much attention and camera time as Bedard did in his rookie game 1 last night

In some ways this was inevitable, considering the close ties between the VGK and BWK. I was at the Wheat Kings game on Saturday and there is some merch with that logo available, but it is not what I'd consider to be especially prominent. Looks like something that might get used for a couple of years before it gets retired.

Looks like a rush job, but a far sight better than just sewing the Wild logo over the ICE logo on the old sets as the Wild were hinting at doing during the offseason. I think these could have been improved dramatically by simplifying the logo to just the wolf-head component without the roundel and lettering. They could have used the shoulder patches to highlight where they're from.

This was the 2008 Moose tribute to the 1948 RCAF team that was cited as the inspiration for what was unveiled on Saturday: Then more recently the Moose used this tribute: So overall this look is pretty familiar to hockey fans in Winnipeg.

Yeah, they're only wearing "the 48" 3 times this season. Whereas the WHA heritage jersey will be worn closer to 10 times. I don't mind "the 48" but it's one of those jerseys that will be on a clearance rack next season.

Interesting. I wonder if this is how it's going to be for the foreseeable future? Or is this just a "temporary", maybe off-the-shelf look until something permanent can be devised and rolled out?

The Rush had to do something. Their old identity was extremely dated, it was terminally stuck in 2005. If someone back then had created an energy drink to sell at Nickelback concerts, the old Rush logo would have been absolutely perfect for it. Not so much anymore. No question that the new logo is an overdone try-hard where every line has some sort of ridiculously contrived "symbolism" behind it, no doubt to justify all the billable hours that went into creating it. But it's still better than the old one.

Or as I like to call it, the peak of CFL uniform/logo design!

I miss the all over logo too. I knew it wouldn't last when they unveiled it, though. Football doesn't like to think of itself as a traditionalist sport (like baseball, for instance) but it is. The logo and graphic design package was bold enough, I knew that helmet wasn't going to last. Which is too bad.

Any thoughts on the season so far? Here are a few of mine: -Wow BC Lions, no Nathan Rourke but still even better than last year -The Elks are a trainwreck, burn that sucker right to the ground -Calgary is surprisingly mid by their standards but they are good enough to be competitive -Saskatchewan is typically mid by their standards but I don't see them going the distance -Winnipeg is still a good team but they are no longer the dominant force they once were, they're getting older -At one time an Argonauts team this good would have been shoved down Canada's throats by the national sports media but the CFL in Toronto being what it is now, this very impressive double blue team is toiling in relative obscurity -Ottawa is not very good and that win over Winnipeg was a mirage, their defense is good but not good enough to carry them through the season -Hamilton could be good but no QB is going to derail their chances -Montreal is not really that good of a team, but they could exploit Hamilton and Ottawa's misery to end up in second place in the East.

I caught Wenatchee Wild GM Bliss Littler on the Pipeline Podcast, he said that the Wild don't have enough time to design and order sets of uniforms for this year so they will be using the Winnipeg ICE template with Wild logos on them. (Not sure if that means they will be sewing Wild logos directly over the ICE logos on the existing uniform sets? Or if they will be making new Wild jerseys with the Wild logo right on them, he didn't get into that level of detail.)

That old logo has to be one of the wordiest hockey logos in existence. 8 different words/place names by my count. Also someone once told me that the Sagueneens logo was a reference to blueberries or some other sort of berry that grows in the region... is there any truth to that, or was my leg being pulled?

The BC Lions road "fog" greys remind me a lot of the 92-93 Ottawa Rough Riders. Unless I'm overlooking someone, I think that was the last road grey set before BC this season?

That's a fair assessment. It looks like the WHL never wanted to be in Winnipeg, but it was induced by the promise of a new arena in a large WHL market that it could hold up as a trophy. When the new arena never materialized, the WHL no longer had a use for Winnipeg and that pretty much was the end of it. This despite the fact that the plan B probably could have worked out well over the long term.

The ICE's facility at The Rink was essentially a team complex. It's located under the stands of the main rink. You can get a taste of it from this video... I've been in there and there is more to it than what the video shows, but this hits the highlights. There is still a CSSHL team playing at The Rink, so maybe they will adopt it for their use. As for the arena situation, one of the owners' friends explains it pretty succinctly in this HFBoards post he wrote yesterday: https://forums.hfboards.com/threads/winnipeg-ice-sold-moving-to-wenatchee-washington-renamed-wenatchee-wild.2860712/post-190794729 Not surprisingly the carrying costs skyrocketed due to inflation and interest rate hikes. When the ICE owners presented a plan B, the WHL turned it down and forced the sale which resulted in the relocation. Clearly the league had lost its taste for trying to make it work in Winnipeg.

The plan at the outset was to build a new arena next to a then-new ice rink facility, called The Rink Training Centre. The ICE's owners actually threw down a fair bit of money to build a team facility next to what was going to be their arena, but obviously the WHL arena never materialized and they only ever used it for practices (no idea what happens to all that stuff now, that's pretty big 4 year old facility to be sitting there without a use). I would imagine the pandemic threw them quite a curveball. The first season's playoffs were wiped out, and then the team was off the radar for the entire second season when they played a short bubble season in Saskatchewan. In the meantime, inflation caused construction costs to skyrocket. Maybe they could cobble together money for a new arena at cost of $60 million or whatever the original figure was going to be, but not at, say, $85 million. Clearly circumstances changed significantly between 2019 and 2022.

The oars were a gimmicky mistake because it just looks like a blatant Oregon ripoff. The rest is good, though. The Cambridge Blue is nice. I think it just needs some contrast, a solid colour from top to bottom works for some colours but not this one. Maybe Oxford Blue or White pants might have worked better with those jerseys? That said, this new look is definitely an improvement over the ludicrously minimalist look the Argos have had over the past couple of seasons. But I still don't think it measures up to the peak Argos look of the early 80s. As good as the "new" boat logo is, that bit of football brown in there back in the old days just took it to the next level.

If a smaller, let's say, 5,000 seat arena had already existed in Winnipeg the ICE could have made a go of it. The interest and fan support was there. But it's understandable that no one wanted to lay out the better part of a hundred million dollars to build them a new arena, that part was hard to swallow. So what's the deal with the Wenatchee Wild's identity? Do they just carry everything forward from the BCHL to the WHL? Or is a new look likely? Also, what usually happens to the old team's stuff in a situation like this? I wouldn't mind copping an team-issued ICE jersey if I could get my hands on one...

That's interesting, I have never ever seen that around these parts. I will keep my eyes open to see if it catches on.

MJHL fan late to the party here. I stumbled upon these and I think they are awesome. In a league where a lot of logos look cartoony or like they were cobbled together in Microsoft Word, these would be a huge step forward in professionalizing the league's appearance and presentation. I'm a Winnipeg guy and I'm a fan of the Winnipeg teams, I try to make it out at least a few times a year to support the Blues and the Freeze. The Blues have a new set that is OK but a little underwhelming. But the Freeze jerseys that they use right now just looks like a rush job which I am assuming it was. The template is OK but the current wordmark logo flat out sucks. I really like what the OP has done with the Freeze template but I'm not sold on the replacement logo... it looks a little too hallowe'eny or gimmicky for my liking. I respect the effort, it is not easy to come up with a compelling logo for a team named after a somewhat abstract concept, but I'm not sure this is quite it. I have to say, I love the retro jerseys... I started watching the MJHL in the late 80s and it would be a real trip to see those throwback Blues jerseys on the ice, ha. Anyway, well done. These are great.