Digby

New entry for the USL Super League women's competition... DC Power FC, not to be confused with the NWSL Washington Spirit though they will part-time share Audi Field. This logo is pretty cool but I am at a total loss on the name, which seems like a great way to be buried in search results under nine electrical supply websites and three hackneyed political commentary columns...

Not sure how reliable a source this dude is, but this all seems well within the realm of possibility, doesn't it. Based on the petulance and bus-throwing I've seen from Caleb Porter so far this season, it's difficult to imagine that Bruce Arena could possibly have led a more toxic workplace.

Going to be a fun few years in Foxborough, now that the Krafts no longer have anyone to hide behind for either of their teams.

Secondary market prices for the ECF games in Boston plummeted by close to half, once it became clear that it'd be Indy and not NY coming to town. Welp.

CARI rules, though sometimes I find some of the distinctions to be arbitrary. I also have not seen it categorize two related aesthetics, though maybe I've just missed it: the medieval-goth-meets-raver look popularized by Life of Pablo-era Kanye West, and the subsequent 60s-nature-witch revival currently en vogue amongst a triangular path running roughly from Kacey Musgraves, to darkwave-adjacent DJs, to dive bars that also serve natural wines.

3 hours ago, Old School Fool said:

Gotta love the Indiana Fever being boneheaded and making a gray court at the worst time. If you wanna watch Caitlin Clark you have to look at this eyesore. Also there is seriously a Cheez-It ad on the free throw line.

 

Not just an ad, literally looks like a Cheez It box. WNBA might finally take off but they'll still stick with the undignified advertising schemes of a cash-poor, lower-tier South American soccer league.

Also think, in general, that this would be a good time for the WNBA to dial in its teams' branding rather than indulge in the leftfield City schemes, but clearly I have an outdated idea of how to build a brand. (Maybe I need a new industry.) Like the Connecticut Sun were out there in black and purple last night and looked more like, well, a Phoenix Suns sister team. Probably got more eyes on their broadcast last night than any other in their history -- why not take advantage of that fact instead of confusing the marketplace?

22 hours ago, Digby said:

Still no updates on LockerVision for the 2nd round games after the initial four. Does anyone ever look at that website besides people on this board?

I lied, it's up now. Sanity has gone by the wayside and the Celtics are wearing black at home vs the Cavs in white tonight. Also OKC wearing their City at home (I kinda like it tbh) and the Wolves throwbacks return tomorrow.

Last night I was struck at how normal the Knicks looked in the faux-90s uniforms, I'm coming around on those... at least til the camera zooms into the stupid wordmark.

1 hour ago, MrAstrodome said:

I'm guessing gold, athletic or otherwise  is too similar to the Sparks?

If it's not a problem for the Warriors/Lakers rivalry, shouldn't be a problem here. Seems to be a larger underlying shift in the philosophies of branding WNBA sides at work here.

12 minutes ago, coco1997 said:

Yeah, I wasn't a huge fan of Boston's City Connect (I'm pretty sure most people weren't) when it was first unveiled, but it's grown on me, especially when viewed in the context of the program as a whole. It's definitely better than most of the designs from the past year or two. 

It didn't seem to sell well at first either, but this year and last I've seen a lot more of that merch out in the wild. Especially amongst kids. 

As a local it has not grown on me at all and I still find those uniforms hideous. At the very least, I would've used regular Red Sox fonts both on the front and back, and used the actual Marathon colors, which are a deeper shade of royal blue and, I think, a deeper more golden yellow. Not sure why they insisted on the bright pastel shades. (also ditch the stupid 617 bib logo, we ran out of 617 phone numbers a generation ago.)

I assume they couldn't fly too close to the B.A.A. sun, though, because the Marathon has been an Adidas operation for many many years.

How many sucker-punches does Draymond Green have to throw before TNT stops giving him a part-time gig? I hope they lose the contract just for that.

Huh, didn't anticipate that one. Very smooth way to retcon the "Warriors" as a Norse mythology thing and not a Native stereotype thing. Not sure I agree with rendering a logo that's a twist on the GSW logo, but then going with a totally different color scheme. 

Still no updates on LockerVision for the 2nd round games after the initial four. Does anyone ever look at that website besides people on this board?

3 hours ago, gosioux76 said:

As for the Mavs, it barely registered with me when they simplified their look from the Nowitizki-era look to what they wear now. Like the Wolves, the Mavs are another team that I think made a mistake by dropping green from their color palette. They original use of forest green paired with blue was a great look. 

I agree but that's also why I'm less high on the Wolves bringing back that original look -- the Mavs feel like the green-and-blue team to me, and the original Wolves look felt too much like an off-brand version of that. Lowering the green usage but dialing up the teal tint to the blue was the right move. (Though the green flashes of the late-00s look, when they first did that evolution away from the unhinged 90s Timberwolves lettering, maybe there was something interesting to do there but they never figured out how to use it besides as an afterthought.)

On 2024-05-11 at 5:59 PM, Dynasty said:

After seeing some of the DAL-OKC series, we have all this talk about the Thunder and their need of change, but the Mavericks have been going on almost a quarter of an entire century in the same look. Their color scheme is the worst of it, like what is their second color after Royal blue? Is it Navy? Silver? Black? Such a mess.

The instructive thing here too, which I may have mentioned earlier, is to look at their crowds. You'll people wearing every shade of blue, and also black, and also a ton of kelly green now with the throwback or fauxback stuff they've been putting out in recent years (and the Stars). Not that every team needs their crowds to be monochrome with the dorky 2XL t-shirt giveaways, but they shouldn't look like they're all rooting for different teams, either. 

The horrible font choices and the goofy logo are, of course, simply tired on their own.

Timbers haven't won a PR cycle since Portlandia was on the air, so good for them. Wonder what the financials look like, with the fan pressure and the previous sponsor debacle giving Tillamook an unusual amount of leverage.

I always forget about the Dwight/Stan Orlando teams even though they were very good and had a couple of playoff classics with those Celtics teams. It's interesting in hindsight to look at the ways that the modern game started to show up a little bit, e.g. how Pop set up those Spurs teams, the Celtics letting Allen and Pierce (relatively) loose on the 3, pearl-clutching about the legalities of the Euro step... But Dwight seems like a total relic of the time.

Not quite the same, but Worcester tore down their sad, empty downtown mall 10 years ago and had an adjacent minor-league ballpark a short time later, and a wildly successful one at that (which I hate to say as a child of the PawSox, but...) Hartford's AA and AHL and USL teams have all been "adequate but not exceptional" in terms of attendance, no? Not sure that bodes well. Just be happy with UConn, maybe they could get some Connecticut Sun games in there too but I suppose that defeats the Sun's entire purpose of filling space at the casino arena.

(Interesting note though that the Sun are playing a game at the TD Garden this year, for the first time. Little reversal of the old Celtics tradition. I kind of miss barnstorming games, but I guess we only do those in Mexico City and Abu Dhabi instead of Hartford nowadays.)

The other thing is, in the modern state of things in pro sports, I don't know that the 91 corridor is culturally distinct enough to be its own major-league market (leaving aside all the obvious economic changes there of the past two generations). Tough to ever draw any sort of attention away from the long-established Boston and New York teams. Not exactly an underserved market.

24 minutes ago, MalibuSunrise said:

 

I hope not. There's already a blue & gold team with the Chicago Sky. The name should be announced next week or relatively soon. Not sure if they have the branding yet. 

 

Also in the news: Toronto has landed an expansion team for 2026. 

Sky are more sky blue and navy though, not Warriors royal, so I don't know that that would stop them. That said, wouldn't be surprised to see the ownership group see this as their opportunity to go fully into the slate color that they love so much, just for funsies. The Toronto team is not going to be owned by MLSE but as a side project of one of their billionaire investors, so tough to guess what direction that one might go in.

"Proposed" in the title is doing a lot of legwork here. If one dying city is no longer a major-league market, there's always trying two dying cities, together.

12 hours ago, BBTV said:

 

why is it one or the other?  A coach doesn't count against a cap.

It's not, I'm being sarcastic and mocking the new nepo-baby owner. Though an owner who keeps paying a coach (or two) that's no longer employed by his team may be less interested in paying the big salaries and luxury taxes that are likely required to compete.

In any case, the imbalance of that roster was clear from day one but he wanted to make a splash instead. Fine, whatever. It's a lot like the recent Nets in that the team had a decent foundation, maybe even a better one considering their recent playoff pedigree. But blowing up your roster to cater to KD and friends never seems to work.

The Thunder have had quite a few good alts, obviously the Native heritage one was probably tops. But I really liked the o.g. statement in navy, which felt like a solid update of their default look (the current City sorta does this too, but with a much worse wordmark). Last year's City really made the color scheme sing, too, with replacing the yellow with red clay and using that warm grey base to make the colors pop. I don't know why they stubbornly cling to the weak logo and the awful fonts, which have always belonged to a tasteless mall in 1998.

Reaching European top-flight soccer levels of "lol nothing matters" on the coaching carousel.

Hot-sh!t new Suns owner guy has to eat four years of that contract he handed Vogel. I'm sure that's money we could put towards a point guard, but okay.

Getting Christian folk art vibes from that branding. Were we jamming on "Graceland" during the design process or what? Odd.

4 minutes ago, Foxxtrot44 said:

There's already a ready-made color scheme for the Black Diamonds (ignoring my earlier brilliant suggestions).

This color scheme would weirdly work but a.) there are the symbols that aren't black diamonds and imply "bunny slope", and b.) it's gotta be a vintage outdoors outfitter aesthetic. That look is all over Huckberry these days and I can't think of a better signifier of the type of people a Utah NHL team will want to sell to.

4 minutes ago, Morgan33 said:

Nope, it's going to be the Utah Powder.  I can feel it .

Adam Ruzicka is so mad right now.

I'm ready for a FIFA-wide rethink of the offside rule and protocols at any moment.