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Portland Trailblazers Logo?


rmackman

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Posted

I like the Trailblazers logo. I always have. Maybe I just like their colors, I dunno...but the thing is...A - What relevance does a Trail Blazer have in Portland, Ore. B - What is that spiral thingy they have for a logo?

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"Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be eaten. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve. It doesn't matter whether you're a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you'd better be running." - Unknown | 🌐 Check out my articles on jerseys at Bacon Sports 🔗
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Posted

I believe the Trail blazer name refers to the Route traveled from Missouri to Oregon via the Oregon Trail (I could be wrong).

The swirl, part makes a B = blazers, and the top part is a P = Portland.

Our experts from the great NW might know better - or ask TANK, he's great at that stuff.

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Posted

no no no

K, A trail blazer is significant of the Oregon Trail, during the gold rush days (the path people used to travel in search of riches.) the 10 lines binding together show motion, and the 5 silver represent the 5 players on the court on one team, and the 5 red represent the other 5 players on the other team. i remember reading that when they updated their logo a few years back...

feel free to correct me if im wrong

Posted

Yeah it looks like a b and a q. how about call them the Portland Quail Blasters? I'd like to see someone come up with a logo for that, hahaha!

"Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be eaten. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve. It doesn't matter whether you're a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you'd better be running." - Unknown | 🌐 Check out my articles on jerseys at Bacon Sports 🔗
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Posted

Hello, Lewis and Clark??? The explorers of the American west following the Louisiana Purchase??? They mapped the west for Thomas Jefferson (I assume you know who HE is). Their trail/route ended on the Columbia River's entry to the Pacific. They are not the founders of the city of Portland, but passed what would become it.

To to the blazers web site to find more about the logo's history. Remember, it is an update of the team original logo.

Posted
the 10 lines binding together show motion, and the 5 silver represent the 5 players on the court on one team, and the 5 red represent the other 5 players on the other team. i remember reading that when they updated their logo a few years back...

feel free to correct me if im wrong

No need to correct -- this is what the logo represents.

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Founder/Editor, SportsLogos.Net

 

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Posted

Oh hey here's what I found!!!!

The Name

On February 24, 1970, just two weeks after Portland was granted an expansion franchise by the National Basketball Association, Harry Glickman, then executive vice president of the club, announced a public ?name the team? contest. A panel of judges was selected. Harry said he no longer is able to recall names of everyone on the panel but remembers Doug Baker, a popular daily columnist of The Oregon Journal, as one of its members.

The public was invited to mail their entries to the team?s offices, then located in a downtown storefront location on S.W. Yamhill between 5th and 6th Avenues. Harry said there were boxes and boxes of entries mailed in. ?There had to be 10,000,? he remembers. The most popular of the entries was ?Pioneers? but the new franchise had said at the beginning of the contest team nicknames of any Northwest colleges or universities would be ruled out. Portland?s Lewis & Clark College had already claimed the Pioneers nickname.

?There were 172 people who sent in the name ?Trail Blazers? and that is the name the panel ultimately selected,? Glickman said. We determined the contest winner by having a drawing at a regular season NBA game in Memorial Coliseum between Seattle and New York on March 13, he explained. Blake Byrne, general sales manager of KPTV, was winner of the drawing, receiving two season tickets to Blazers home games that year.

At halftime of the March 13 Seattle-New York game, the new name was announced to the crowd of 11,035. It was received, according to former Oregon Journal Sports Editor George Pasero, with less than enthusiastic response including a spattering of boos. ?It really wasn?t very popular when fans first heard it, but of course we all know that changed,? Glickman remembers. Newspaper concerns about the Trail Blazers name (?How would it ever fit in a headline, etc.?) quickly evaporated. And, within a few years, the Blazers (or Trail Blazers) became a household word in Portland, and within seven years worldwide, as ?Go Blazers? and ?Blazermania? became bywords when the city gained a major world championship in its first try.

Additional thoughts: The Trail Blazers name was unique in professional sports. No other major professional or college sports teams at the time used either the Blazers or Trail Blazers nickname. The name, as Glickman noted at the time, ?reflect both the ruggedness of the Pacific Northwest and the start of a major league era in our state.? Trail Blazers (or, more properly trailblazers) is defined by Webster as ?One that blazes a trail to guide others: A pathfinder: A pioneer.? The actual name came from a practice by explorers making paths through forests and marking the paths by chopping a white ?blaze? in trees? bark so others could follow. The term ?trailblazing? has been associated today with others on the cutting edge of discovery such as space exploration, science, medicine, techology and so on. There was absolutely no connection between the name and that of the 92nd Infantry ?Trailblazer? Division that trained at Camp Adair in Corvallis and fought its way through Europe during World War II.

The Pinwheel Logo

It was designed by a cousin of Harry?s, Frank Glickman of Boston. It simply is a modern graphic interpretation of five basketball players from one side going against five players from the other and rotating around a center circle in a pinwheel kind of motion. Nothing else. The original ?pinwheel,? in use as the team?s logo for two decades, was straight vertical in orientation. It was modernized in the mid-1990s to have a forward ?slant? then given an even more modern upgrade with the new ?heritage? interpretation released in 2002.

I still want to call them the Quail Blasters!

"Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be eaten. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve. It doesn't matter whether you're a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you'd better be running." - Unknown | 🌐 Check out my articles on jerseys at Bacon Sports 🔗
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Posted

And now we know - thanks for info guys. I love the history behind the names!

For all you who posted info . . . I am humble before thee . . . :notworthy:

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Posted
Great name, silly corporate logo.

What are you talking about. It's simple and iconic: if you follow basketball in the least, you know the interlocking swirly lines represent the Trail Blazers. Classic look that endured the Cartoon 90s.

♫ oh yeah, board goes on, long after the thrill of postin' is gone ♫

Posted
Great name, silly corporate logo.

It would be more fitting for a telecommunications company than a basketball club.

I always thought it would fit a lumber company...

But the logo does hold up now as well as it did when introduced in 1970. That's all that matters.

Posted

What would you prefer, a pioneer with a torch or something? I'm surprised they didn't come up with that in the 90s, actually.

♫ oh yeah, board goes on, long after the thrill of postin' is gone ♫

Posted
Great name, silly corporate logo.

What are you talking about. It's simple and iconic: if you follow basketball in the least, you know the interlocking swirly lines represent the Trail Blazers. Classic look that endured the Cartoon 90s.

Agreed. It may not be the best representation of a "Trail Blazer", but even through some modifications, it has stood the test of time, and most people (at least sports fans) instantly recognize what team it represents even without the wordmark. I liken it to the Flyers logo in hockey. Same thing.

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Posted

a couple years ago I posted a bunch of stuff that nike had designed

as proposals when they got the JailBlazersas a team. I'll try and dig it up and

post it sometime soon.

Posted
What would you prefer, a pioneer with a torch or something? I'm surprised they didn't come up with that in the 90s, actually.

Worse - they came up with this a couple years ago.

Smells like Phoenix Suns

♫ oh yeah, board goes on, long after the thrill of postin' is gone ♫

Posted
the 10 lines binding together show motion, and the 5 silver represent the 5 players on the court on one team, and the 5 red represent the other 5 players on the other team. i remember reading that when they updated their logo a few years back...

and yup, that is in fact the astoundingly simple answer to the mystery :P i know one thing, you can take one glance and tell whose logo it is

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