Oklahoma City Blazers

20

A considerable number of minor league hockey today teams take the name of a team that played in the same city in decades past. I don't claim this is a complete list, but off the top of my head I can think of the Charlotte Checkers, Flint Generals, Fort Wayne Komets (no, it's not the same franchise, no matter what the team tries to tell you), Kalamazoo Wings, Houston Aeros, Tulsa Oilers, and these guys. Although it's not a universal, there is one thing many of these team names have in common, which is that the name they're re-using isn't really that great. "Generals" is a good name which works reasonably well anywhere, and "Aeros" works quite well for a city with such close ties to NASA. But honestly: "Checkers"? "Oilers"?

Is the logic behind this team's name any better? What, for that matter, is the logic behind this team's name? When I hear the word "blazer" I think of a kind of jacket. Granted, it's a synonym for sports jacket, but I've never seen people playing team sports while wearing one. Heck, even during the days of the Philadelphia Flyers wearing their Sunday-best black slacks, there were no blazers involved. So why do we have a team named after them?

As for the logo, I will reluctantly say it's the best the team has even used. This says more about how bad the old logos were than it does about how good this one is. To the right you will see previous logos, in reverse chronological order. The top one is one they briefly used between my original review for this team and the current one (in other words, I never even got to comment on how stupid it was), and all I can say is: Wow, was it stupid. Not only does the state capitol dome have absolutely no relevance to the name "Blazers", but that isn't even the Oklahoma state capitol dome! It's similar, but not close:

The second one is clearly an attempt to draw a better version of the third one, which was the logo the team used when the current CHL was first created back in 1992. Both seem to represent a hockey puck on fire, and since the logo debuted a mere two years before Fox came up with that idiotic "Comet Puck", I feel the Oklahoma City Blazers organization is on some level culpable for that abomination. I'd suggest finding some way for them to make amends, but I don't want to incite people to violence and nothing short of burning their arena to the ground would atone for so heinous a sin.

The bottom one was the logo the team used back in the 1960s, except for the minor detail that they probably didn't. Have you ever looked at jerseys for teams back in the 1960s and 1970s? Most of them didn't actually have logos on their jerseys. They just had the name of the team (or city) written in block letters the way the New York Rangers do. There wasn't a lot of merchandise in those days, either. So where, precisely, were these logos being used? But if you go to Ralph Slate's Internet Hockey Database ( or, as some people call it, "Slate-a-Base") and look in the logo section, you will see this listed as the logo the Oklahoma City Blazers of the Central Professional Hockey League used in the 1967-68 season. I trust Ralph's information, so even if I have no idea where the logo would have been used, I don't doubt it was their logo.

In any case, the key point is that it, like all the other logos this team has used, sucks. I think it's pretty obvious that none of these logos were anything to write home about. This one isn't, either, but it still edges out the others. And given how poorly the name "Blazers" lends itself to a logo, I suppose "not as lame as the others" is about the best they can hope for if they're going to insist on using that name. Still, every time I look at this thing, the same thing comes to mind:

"Today's espisode of Bush League Factor has been sponsored by the letter B"

Final Score: 20 points.
Penalties: Ers, 9 pts; Name-Logo (quadruply-egregious), 7 pts; Ripoff, 4 pts.
Bonuses: None.