Missouri Mavericks

84

I'm having this massive sense of déjà vu here.

The first thing I noticed about this logo was the color scheme. The medium, slightly tealish blue and orange wasn't all that different from the color scheme that the Charlotte Checkers first used when they debuted back in 1993. Then I noticed that the foreshortening on the horse enlarges its head to the point that it looks like a deranged Precious Moments doll. That, too, goes back to the Charlotte Checkers; I once described their second logo as looking "like the bastard child of an albino gopher and a 'Precious Moments' doll that ran afoul of The Joker from the Batman comics and got hit with that toxin that kills you and freezes your face into a twisted smile." The horse doesn't look quite like that, but it does have a truly strange expression on its face.

Then there's the fact that mavericks are not horses, meaning that the horse in the logo is irrelevant...just like the bear that has appeared in every incarnation of the Checkers' logos.

And where does this team, whose logo is so derivative, so dependent on Charlotte's logo, play? That's right: in a town called Independence. The irony is not lost on me. Also not lost on me is the amusing little coincidence that the arena the Checkers originally played in was called Independence Arena and was located on Independence Boulevard. They're not there anymore, but the arena they are now in (Time-Warner Cable Arena) is also home to the Charlotte Jumper Classic, a show jumping event whose logo features a grey horse and also involves the colors blue and orange.

This is the sort of thing that could confuse anyone, and I think it's confusing the hockey gods. (The hockey gods may be powerful and capricious, but no one ever accused them of being geniuses. If they were, they'd have never let Gary Bettman be in charge of the NHL.) As I write this, the Missouri Mavericks are currently 13th place in a league of 15 teams. The Charlotte Checkers, on the other hand, have the fourth-highest winning percentage out of the twenty teams in their league. My theory? The hockey gods are trying to send wins to Independence, but they're getting confused and sending them to Charlotte instead. I think the Mavericks need to do something to alleviate the confusion. And, as you can guess, I think they can start by getting rid of the blue-and-orange logo with a grey horse in it. What should they put in the horse's place? It doesn't matter. Just about anything would be better.

Except, perhaps, for a bear.

Final Score: 84 points.
Penalties: Region (egregious), 5 pts; Alliteration, 2 pts; Cartoon, 17 pts; Anthropomorphization, 10 pts; Irrelevance, 14 pts; Name-Logo, 2 pts; Equip-Logo (quadruply-egregious), 25 pts; State, 4 pts; Yucky-Logo, 5 pts.
Bonuses: None.