subject: A Whale of a name change [print this page] A Whale of a name change A Whale of a name change
It's official. The Hartford Wolf Pack is now defunct. In its place? The Connecticut Whale.
Not the Whalers (that would have been the Hartford Whalers of the WHA, then the NHL before they became the Carolina Hurricanes), and not the Whales. The Whale. Singular. And once again, a bad idea seems to be getting all sorts of unnecessary traction, could you give me some recommendation about NHL Jerseys Store? ujersy.
Once upon a time, team nicknames were fairly easy to remember. Most were animal names - lions and tigers and bears - or birds - like falcons and eagles. Some were a salute to the indigenous native American population, like the Blackhawks or the Chiefs or the Redskins. Some were based on local names and history, like the old Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers, who became the Dodgers, or the Philadelphia Phillies or Philadelphia 76ers, if you want to buy Philadelphia Flyers Jerseys, maybe ujersy is a good choice.
The point, however, was that for the most part, the names made some sense, and they were plural, which was as it should be, since they represented more than one member of a team. Gordie Howe may have been a Red Wing during his brilliant career with Detroit but combined with Sid Abel and Ted Lindsay, the famed "Production Line" of the early 1950s, the three were Red Wings.
Then came the 1970s and expansion. Suddenly, counting the number of teams in a given league took a calculator, not a couple of fingers.
The National Hockey League's "Original Six" doubled, then doubled again. Major League baseball went from 16 teams to 30. The NFL merged with the old AFL to give America the Super Bowl and a
plethora of new franchises. The NBA doubled in size. At the same time, the number of minor league franchises also began to grow, particularly in hockey as the '70s gave way to the 1980s and 1990s.
The result was that franchises began looking for nicknames that were different. A lot of teams, particularly in the ECHL, began adding "Ice" to those names. Thus were born the Ice Pilots, the IceGators, the IceBreakers and the Icehawks.
It was about the same time that singular names began to crop up. The ECHL had the Greenville Grrrowl and the Pee Dee Pride. "Impact," usually a verb and not a noun, became very popular.
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