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Growing up, along with a love of hockey, baseball was a huge passion of mine. So much so that I tried mastering the All-Star Baseball games for Playstation 2, much like EA’s NHL series, for friendly competition and bragging rights among my friends. (By the way, MVP Baseball 2005 remains perhaps the best sports game of all time, but that’s a blog for another day.) What made All-Star Baseball so fun anyways was its Expansion Mode. You got to create your own team, pick its name, pick a default stadium, have an expansion draft, and go from there. Your team almost always sucked at first, but hey, you brought baseball to (insert obscure city here)!
Naturally, I love the idea of the NHL expanding.
And though I’m still semi-baffled by what adding two more Eastern-based teams does -- for the record, I simply don’t think you can successfully and fundamentally operate with one conference having a clear advantage in terms of making the playoffs -- it’s clear that the talent pool is deep enough for the league to support expansion. (Seriously, look at the list of guys still looking for NHL work and tell me there’s not enough talent to go around.)
Reports indicate that Las Vegas, Seattle, Quebec City, and Toronto will join the NHL in 2017 as part of the league’s four-team expansion. The expansion would be the largest since the league jumped from 17 to 21 teams during a 12-year stretch from 1979 to 1991. We’ve been told countless times that the NHL desperately wants to be the first pro sports league with a team in Vegas, and Quebec City seems like an inevitable return (especially after Winnipeg got their Jets back in 2011) for the league.
Toronto’s a big enough hockey market to support two teams, so that makes sense, and my goodness is Seattle a city that’s proven to be a booming sports market ready to throw their unwavering devotion to any sports team that wants to plant their feet (or skates) there.
So we’ve established the cities. But what about the names?
In Las Vegas, there’s already an ECHL team named the Wranglers. I don’t think it’s a terrible name (though not an overpoweringly strong one either), but its logo is a pretty solid one, I think.
If the league
does intend to put its stamp on Vegas, you’d have to think that the name would be gambling related. At least in some capacity. The easy go-to would be the Las Vegas Gamblers, but that seems a bit corny. I don’t think the Las Vegas Luck, Las Vegas Ace, or Las Vegas Dice work.
(In fact, let’s scrap all singular team names from here on out. They’re ridiculous and I hate them.)
You could spin off the Wranglers theme with something like the Renegades, or the Outlaws, too.
Or we could always giggle at the idea of the Las Vegas Craps.
Quebec City? They’re the Nordiques. Simple. Easy. No question. Next.
In Toronto, maybe the Tigers (though they played in Hamilton, Ont.) make a comeback. Or the Wolves. You’re not going to come up with something as traditional as Maple Leafs, and that’s something that a new Toronto-based team would have to accept from the start, I think.
Over in Seattle, things could get really ugly really quickly. It always seem to come back to the sea with the Pacific Northwest. And while it’s cool and relatively easy to work with, the last thing this league needs is a team called the Seattle Sea Otters or Seattle Storm Chasers. Ideally, a Seattle-based NHL franchise could go back to its original name, the Seattle Metropolitans. The Metropolitans were the first American team to win the Stanley Cup, doing so all the way back in 1917, but folded shortly after. The snag with this name? The NHL has a division called the Metropolitan.
It’d be like naming a Floridian team the Atlantic. It just sounds weird, all things considered.
For Seattle, you think of a team name or logo that’s heavy on Navys, Greens, and Browns. Fortunately for the future Seattle NHL team, this opens up a ton of options. Maybe they could channel their inner-Manitoba and go by the Moose, the name of the former Vancouver Canucks AHL affiliate before the Jets returned to Winnipeg. Some other mammals native to Washington state include the Wolverines, Bobcats, Grizzlies (the Bruins might take exception to that), or Whales.
When it comes to Seattle, again, it could be really awesome or really, really cringeworthy.
So I ask, hockey world, what would you name the alleged expansion clubs?
Ty Anderson has been covering the Boston Bruins for HockeyBuzz.com since 2010, is a member of the Pro Hockey Writers Association's Boston Chapter, and can be contacted on Twitter, or emailed at Ty.AndersonHB[at]gmail.com
Boston Bruins Blogger •Bruins Feature Columnist • 
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