Seattle NHL team’s name fails community test
NHL hockey resumes next week, with all games clustered in just two cities, Toronto (“Centre of the Universe”) and Edmonton (“Gateway to Red Deer”), thanks to the pandemic.
That means all Stanley Cup playoff games will be held in Canada, something that hasn’t happened since 1925.
The winners that year? Your Victoria Cougars. The last nonNHL team to win the cup, they beat the Montreal Canadiens at the Patrick Arena in Oak Bay.
Alas, after one more finals appearance in 1926 — they lost to the Montreal Maroons — their league folded. The Victoria roster moved to Michigan where, after a few years as the Detroit Cougars, they became the Detroit Falcons and, ultimately, Red Wings.
Which brings us to today’s topic: The Seattle Kraken is a stupid name.
Kraken was revealed Thursday as the moniker of the Seattle entry due to join the NHL in 202122. Great Harold Ballard’s ghost, could they have found a worse choice? That is, after “What is a glory hole?” this week’s mostGoogled question might be “What is a kraken?”
FYI, a kraken is a mythical Scandinavian sea monster. It has nothing to do with Seattle or the Pacific Northwest, meaning that, right off the hop, the selection fails the first rule, which says a good team name reflects an aspect of its community. Think Edmonton Oilers, Brandon Wheat Kings, New Westminster Salmonbellies, Prince Rupert Rainmakers, the soon-to-appear Nanaimo Bars or the Atlanta Flames, the latter relating to the torching of the Georgia city in the Civil War. (With that in mind, can anyone explain why Calgary kept the Flames name after inheriting the franchise?)
Although Victoria’s current hockey team rejected my suggestions — A) the Thundering Bureaucrats, or B) the Weed Kings — they did give a nod to the capital’s namesake when deciding to go with Royals. (Also, it set up the potential for a scandaloussounding “Royals beat Prince George” headline when William and Kate visited us in 2016.)
So, ideally, the owners of the new NHL squad to our southeast would have followed the regionally appropriate (not to mention alliterative) pattern set by soccer’s Seattle Sounders (named for Puget Sound), basketball’s Seattle SuperSonics (whose name came from the city’s aircraft industry) and football’s Seattle Seahawks (not a real bird, but close enough). But no, no, instead they had to come up with something that, within minutes of the announcement, had us awash in, er, wisekraks about fans known as Krakheads filling an arena known as the Krak Shack.
Not that the Seattle braintrust is alone in making unfortunate choices. Some have best-before dates. Toronto may love its Raptors, but the name seemed as outdated as Napster or parachute pants as soon as the Jurassic Park-inspired dinosaur craze faded. Same goes for the Anaheim Mighty Ducks, who came into being a year after the Disney movie of the same name (the Mighty part disappeared after Disney sold the team).
In the 1990s, with gun crime sweeping the U.S. capital, basketball’s Washington Bullets morphed into the less-violent Wizards. Likewise, baseball’s Tampa Bay Devil Rays became the supposedly lesssatanic Rays. (Grammarians still dream of the Maple Leafs becoming the Maple Leaves, but that’s almost as unlikely as Toronto winning the cup.)
Likewise, you don’t see many schools still splitting teams names along gender lines — the
University of Georgia Lady Bulldogs, say. It has been 30 years since UVic ditched Vikings and Vikettes in favour of Vikes (which sounds like a sporty five-speed.)
Also, note the current — and long overdue — examination of Indigenous-themed names. Some are flat-out hurtful: How on earth could we have ever thought that Redskins was acceptable?
Other cases are less clear-cut. The Chicago Blackhawks argue their name honours an individual leader. Do Seattle’s historic hockey names, Thunderbirds and Totems, constitute cultural appropriation or regional pride? To stay on the side of the angels, the Edmonton Eskimos just decided to rebrand themselves. The owner of the Saanich Braves came to the same place without being shoved. The Atlanta Braves have not.
When it comes to catching up with the times, some teams need to get kraken.
SEATTLE — The name Seattle Kraken seems to have had an air of inevitability around it even during the earliest days of the NHL expansion franchise.
Heidi Dettmer, the franchise’s vice-president of marketing, said: “The first time in our office, there’s only 10 of us in our office, and we put up our NHL Seattle sign on the front door. And the very next morning there was a Post-it on the door that said: ‘Release the Kraken.’ So it’s definitely something that we’ve heard almost as a rallying cry.”
The franchise made those early fans happy Thursday when it revealed the team would, indeed, be called the Kraken.
After starting with a list of about 1,200 names and suggestions — no matter how outlandish — Dettmer and Seattle’s front office whittled them down to a final group of five.
Each was placed into its own silo, as they called it, and given thoughtful and independent consideration with an eye toward what would be the best brand for the franchise. Ultimately, Seattle opted to unleash the sea creature from Scandinavian folklore on the rest of the NHL.
“I think that we felt like this is so authentic and noble and we hit all the main things that we really wanted, that we feel really strongly that this is the right choice,” Dettmer said. “I’ve totally fallen in love with this brand and I think our fans will.”
Kraken was the winner over options that might have been safer and possibly less polarizing. From the start, Sockeyes, Steelheads — even Metropolitans in a nod to Seattle’s hockey history — were among the fan favourites.
There was even a push from some for the team to try to acquire the Thunderbirds name from the local junior team. But fans that loved Kraken were loud and fervent.
“The Kraken is a name born of the fans. It was suggested and championed by the fans,” Seattle CEO Tod Leiweke said.
Within their passion, the front office and its brand committee found an opportunity to be a bit unconventional. They opted for a name not everyone will like, but one that everyone will talk about.
The time it took to arrive at Thursday’s announcement had more to do with finalizing the logo and colours, with delays thrown in. Seattle decided on Kraken early in the year, Dettmer said. Then came the ancillary pieces.
The logo was of major importance. The primary logo is a tentacle shaped into an “S” in the style of the old Seattle Metropolitans jersey and logo. The Metropolitans
were the first American team to win the Stanley Cup, in 1917.
“We needed a mark that was noble and [Seattle GM] Ron Francis was someone who kept hitting that home,” said Nic Corbett, director of NHL relations with Adidas. “It has to be noble, it has to be strong.”
The primary colours are a deep dark blue complemented by lighter shades of blue. Corbett said one of the unique aspects of the initial home jersey renderings is that all the white has been removed, allowing the bolder colours to stand out.
“We wanted to make sure [the name] was truly authentic to Seattle and being a city built by the sea — both figuratively and literally — it works really well,” Dettmer said. “We’ve got the Puget Sound that’s the waterfront of our city that has these deep, dark waters that are a little mysterious as well.”