spartacat_12

Those aren’t bad, but not a chance a Houston NHL team would go with green as the primary colour.

So wait, are the “host city-specific” logos really just recoloured versions of the garbage neutral one?

At least the NFL has gone to the effort of designing an illustrated version of their trophy. They didn’t just do a google image search of the Vince Lombardi Trophy.

It would have been very ambitious to move the team to a new market this off-season. The Thrashers to Winnipeg announcement happened in May, but it sounds like most of the details had been worked out well before that. The North bubble division was built out of necessity. No one wants a 3 hour time change to travel for a divisional game.

I know Coyotes is a fairly generic name that would work in a lot of places, but if they are playing somewhere else next season I hope they find a way to rebrand. If it’s rushed maybe we get stuck with a Tennessee Oilers situation for a year or two. If it’s KC or Quebec I think it’s safe to say they’d bring back the Scouts/Nords name. Not sure about Houston. The Aeros name & double blue scheme is too close to the Jets brand.

I was listening to today’s 32 Thoughts, and they talked about SLC. It sounds like Smith is more interested in the clean slate of an expansion team, but it is a possibility for the Yotes. They’d need to do some work on the arena to accommodate the ice though. The other cities that got brought up were Houston, KC, Sacramento, and QC.

Not this time. They pushed all the chips they had left into the middle on this vote. Even the media members who have always been bullish on Arizona seem to have lost all optimism tonight.

McDavid did win a playoff series in his 2nd season. Chicago still feels a long way away from even making the playoffs.

Even with Bedard, Chicago is still in the very early stages of their rebuild and has a lot of work to do. Crosby came to Pittsburgh with Malkin & Fleury already in the system. The Oilers already had Draisaitl when McDavid got drafted. Bedard is pretty much joining a blank slate. The Hawks do have a lot of picks + $40M in cap space, so we’ll see if they get aggressive to try and speed up the rebuild.

I think the worst logo talk is a bit hyperbolic, but I agree that they’d be better off leaning into local imagery/nods to the old franchise. Returning to a mostly unchanged 2D logo was the safe rebranding option, and it’s miles better than the previous set, although that was a pretty low bar to clear. It’s funny because the other day I was thinking it’d be interesting to try and come up with a Weagle style logo involving a beaver & the Peace Tower. I wish I could remember the name of the designer, but there was a concept series a while ago that imagined the Sens branding if the original franchise never folded. This version of the logo was my favourite.

So you acknowledge that it’s possible for Sun Belt franchises to turn things around, but somehow think it’s impossible for Arizona to do it? You said it yourself, there was a time when Nashville couldn’t draw fans and was on the verge of relocation. You also left out the fact that Tampa was a disaster before Vinik bought the team and resuscitated the organization. If this arena vote doesn’t go their way in the next couple of weeks they’ll have to begin seriously looking at relocation, but I’d prefer to see them get a proper rink in Tempe. For all the complaining people do about tax payer money going towards pro sports stadiums, no one seems to mention that the Tempe citizens are getting a much better deal than the residents of Calgary got for their new building.

Both feature a gold-helmeted warrior as a logo, sparkly gold stripes with a laurel pattern, and red trim. The Sens' current look is fine.

I don't know if these examples really make the point you're hoping to make. Charlotte got their team back 2 years after the first Hornets moved, Seattle getting the Sonics back is inevitable now that they have a proper arena, and David Stern openly stated that Vancouver was a great market & that the league botched it. Plus the Grizzlies, Pelicans, and Thunder are 3 of the bottom 4 teams in the league when it comes to franchise value, so I wouldn't call any of the relocations a massive success for the league.

Too similar to the Golden Knights.

I'd say going from a market with a 13% state tax to one with 0 state taxes would be the main appeal for free agents.

This looks alright in a vacuum (although I'd ditch the navy pants), but it feels like they overdid it on the tributes. The casual fan doesn't have any interest in reading a paragraph long explanation for every element of the uniform. The focus should be on making a nice looking uniform & incorporating a couple local/historical references.

Where are you seeing anyone expressing enthusiasm for another team in Atlanta? Aside from the odd Georgia resident who is still carrying a torch for the Thrashers, every reaction I've seen has been "they think it can work a third time?!", or "they expect people to drive to the suburbs?" It's one think to dunk on the low hanging fruit surrounding the Coyotes, it's another to just make up opinions that don't exist & claim that a large sect of hockey fans actually believe them.

While the initial Edge era for the Wild was a mess, I wouldn't really say "nothing matches" for them now. Sure, their home & away jerseys aren't perfect inverses of each other, but they match just as much as Montreal or Chicago do. They use the same logo & font on both jerseys, and the striping on the sleeves is close. It's a lot better than when they had a red home jersey with a roundel logo & block font, and a mostly green road jersey with the jagged custom numbers & the logo on it's own.

BOS over FLA TB over TOR NYR over NJ CAR over NYI COL over SEA DAL over MIN VGK over WPG EDM over LA BOS over TB NYR over CAR DAL over COL EDM over VGK NYR over BOS DAL over EDM NYR over DAL

I think teams should always try and do a rebrand when they relocate. Obviously back in the '50s the logistics around moving a franchise had the branding as an afterthought, but when it comes to modern sports marketing you have a much better chance at establishing yourself with a new brand. It also helped that the Dodger, Giants, Lakers all had pretty generic logos/uniforms that didn't explicitly try to reflect their nicknames. Look at Las Vegas. The Raiders kept their name (which makes sense as they're a bit of a nomadic franchise), and because of that they don't really feel like Vegas's team. Compare that to the Golden Knights, who designed an entire brand around being "Vegas's team". The other thing to consider is if a market ends up getting a new team. Seattle is likely getting back their NBA team in the next decade, and it would be really awkward of the OKC Sonics were in the league. We'd likely just end up with another Hornets/Pelicans situation.

Playoff golfing jokes aside, hopefully this means that they're ditching the red helmets on the road for the post-season.

These should be the basis for Minnesota's primary uniforms:

I miss the era when there were 7 different coloured helmets used in the league.

Ah yes, because home fans were never hostile to vocal supporters of the visiting team before legalized betting became a thing . I'm obviously not condoning that kind of behaviour at all, but it was really a no-win situation for the Raptors operations staff. If it were any other kid screaming like that I guarantee they would've at least been spoken to by security & the parents would have been warned, but the optics of kicking out the family of a top-5 player in franchise history would have been awful. The entire discourse around the situation has been ridiculous. Before the screamer was identified every reaction online was, "kick that kid out", "security needs to talk to the parents", etc, but as soon as people found out who it was a segment of fans suddenly got on their high horse and changed their tune to, "how dare you criticize DeMar's daughter, she can do whatever she wants"