The Tampa Bay Lightning officially unveiled their 20th anniversary logo today. It's very much in line with the club's new branding. And the style reminds me a little of the Calgary Flames' 30th anniversary logo from a few years ago.
You can read more about the Bolts' 20th-year plans on their website.
What's your instant read on it? Good, bad or ugly?
The 2012 NHL Entry Draft opens in Pittsburgh tomorrow. With that, a number of teams will be celebrating with their fans. I've never understood why teams feel the need to brand their draft day parties with special logos, but every year we always get a few.
Here are the ones I've tracked down for this weekend.
The Chicago Blackhawks, Columbus Blue Jackets, Montreal Canadiens and New York Islanders are all promoting their draft day events with specially-designed logos. I don't really have anything more to say about them, but the blog was getting a bit stale.
Looks like I nearly missed the Winnipeg Jets' draft party logo. Thanks @aoystreck.
Two big 2013 events in minor league hockey officially have logos now.
The ECHL is marking its 25th birthday with a new mark for the 2012-13 season. The logo was unveiled yesterday. It's your standard anniversary logo.
Here's what the league says: "The logo has the traditional ECHL logo surrounded by the number ‘25’ enclosed in a classic circle flanked on the left side by 1988 and on the right side by 2013 with the Premier ‘AA’ Hockey tagline on the bottom."
It'll be featured on all sorts of merchandise and anything related to the ECHL for next 12 months. Exciting stuff.
Like clockwork, we can count on the ECHL to celebrate an anniversary every five years. Here are the logos they've used over the last 15 seasons.
Elsewhere, the Hershey Bears unveiled the logo for the 2013 AHL Outdoor Classic, an event they'll be hosting next winter. And it looks very chocolatey.
The Bears will host the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins in the elements on Sun,, Jan. 20, 2013. This year also happens to be the Bears' 75th in existence. So mark another anniversary divisible by five.
By the way, back in the ECHL, the Colorado Eagles are celebrating their 10th anniversary. And of course there's a logo to go with it.
Earlier this month, the OHL's Mississauga St. Michael's Majors were sold to new ownership who decided the nine-syllable name was too much of a mouthful. Beginning this fall, the team will be called the Mississauga Steelheads, and will have a sharp new logo to go with the new name.
The name was selected through fan voting and announced just after the sale of the franchise. Then on Tuesday, the new Steelheads logo was unveiled.
After the previous blog post — the unveiling of the Denver Cutthroats logo — I have to ask why trout are suddenly taking over hockey branding. Is it just the names? Granted, Steelheads and Cutthroats sound pretty menacing but when your logo is a silly-looking fish... Is it just me?
By the way, just because the fish looks silly doesn't mean the logo does. I'm a big fan of this one — you know, as far as fish logos go. And it's miles beyond the Cutthroats logo. Uniforms for the Steelheads are still to come.
The ECHL is in the middle of another one of its growth spurts. Aside from the two expansion teams beginning play this year — whose branding efforts we've been following over the past few months — the league as also picked up two more graduations from the Central Hockey League.
Joining the Orlando Solar Bears and San Francisco Bulls as newcomers in 2012 are the Fort Wayne Komets and Evansville IceMen. I don't expect any significant logo or uniform changes for these teams as the graduate into a bigger league. By the way, the Colorado Eagles made the jump from the CHL to ECHL last year and now they're hosting next season's ECHL All-Star Classic.
As of the 2012-13 season, the ECHL has 23 teams in 16 states — including Alaska!
After losing the Colorado Eagles to the ECHL last season, the Central Hockey League is expanding back into the Centennial State in 2012 with the addition of the Denver Cutthroats.
The CHL made the announcement about an expansion team in Denver last month, but the team officially unveiled its name, colors and logo today. Interestingly, the new look was created by Denver-based Adrenalin, the same agency also responsible for the Colorado Avalanche and Phoenix Coyotes logos in the NHL.
So it's troubling to see them really miss the mark on this logo. But let's face it, this is a CHL team so I'm assuming they didn't exactly put their "best people" on it. They probably have bigger fish.
So it's a trout in a D with mountains and river rapids. Not a bad idea, but for some reason it ended up looking like it was drawn by an amateur for a logo contest you might find here on Icethetics.
That critique may have been a little harsh, so I'll balance it out. I love the color scheme. Nobody in hockey really uses that shade of green and I don't understand why not. I like that the blue is muted but not necessarily navy. And together with those two colors, the red accent really pops off the screen.
Here's some extra stuff from the team's press release:
“We wanted to be sure the logo included elements and colors that depict the state of Colorado and the city of Denver,” said Adrenalin President Dan Price. “The trout maintains a position between white mountain peaks and river rapids, and breaks through a forward moving ‘D’ — representative of Denver's progressive population.”
The Cutthroat Trout was named Colorado's state fish in 1994.
Jersey designs will probably be unveiled later this summer, but no specific mention was made in the press release.
For more about the team, check out their Facebook page, Twitter feed and official website.
Meantime, what do you think of the logo? Am I being too critical or does it deserve to be fileted? (Sorry, that was the last pun.)
