Thursday, September 4, 2008

Thunderstunk!

Oklahoma City unveiled the new logo and name for their new NBA team.

The name was no surprise. Clay Bennett decided to call it the Thunder. He was unable to use the name Tornadoes because god forbid a tornado hit the midwest and some clueless newsman led the broadcast with "Tornado kills five in Tulsa, and Tornadoes kill the Clippers 106-89." Thunder has never killed anybody, not yet anyway.

As for the logo, to paraphrase the old joke, "That logo wasn't released. It escaped."



Here are the rules.

NBA: plural nouns as mascots
WNBA: abstract nouns as symbols

The way it is, and the way it should be, forever and ever, amen. As a big fan of the Atlanta Dream and all the grief we got because of our name, well who's laughing now?

I can't name a logo in the W that's worse than that one. Even the Washington Mystics logo looks better, because if you squint really hard you might detect a whiff of magical smoke in Washington's logo. (Atlanta, unable to represent "Dream" in concrete terms, simply went with a stylin' red-blue-white logo that any ABA team would have been proud to have.) Whereas OKC's logo represents...nothing.

I suspect that OKC called their team the "Thunder" because they hoped that fans would mistake them for the Seattle Storm.

No comments: