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Mississippi RiverKings 32

Notice: All logos on this page are included within the parameters of 17 U.S.C. § 107, which states that the reproduction of a copyrighted work for purposes of criticism and/or comment is not an infringement of copyright. No challenge to the copyrights of these logos is intended by their inclusion here.
Posted 2016 April 3

For over a decade, the Memphis/Mississippi RiverKings have used a logo which prominently featured a snapping turtle. I've already spent a lot of space discussing the problems with such a logo, the supposed justification for said logo, and the problems with the supposed justification, so I'm not going to go into detail here, but here's the TL;DR version: putting turtles in a hockey logo is a bad idea because cowering during a fight is referred to as "turtling", the team claimed the turtle was in there because snapping turtles are referred to in the Memphis area as "kings of the Mississippi", and that claim was dubious because according to a friend of mine in Memphis, neither she nor any of the half-dozen or so people she asked (including some Memphis natives) had ever heard that term used to refer to snapping turtles except in press releases from the team when the logo was unveiled.

But none of that matters, because the team has a new logo. That new logo is a dramatic improvement over the old one, because it just about couldn't not be a dramatic improvement over the old one. A logo could be quite mediocre and still be a dramatic improvement over the old one. For example, the new logo. Seriously, it's a cliché from start to finish: the first letter of the geographic name on a shield with a crown on top. That's about the most cliché thing you could do for a team whose name was a variant on "kings". The least they could have done was make a reference to the river somehow.

That being said, there's not really much else you can do with this name unless you want to do something goofy. Think of all the teams in hockey whose name is or contains the word "kings". You've got the Los Angeles Kings, whose logo is a shield with "LA" and a crown on it. You've got the Brandon Wheat Kings, whose logo is the team name with a wheat stalk and a crown. You've got the Edmonton Oil Kings, whose logo is a crown. See the pattern? I suppose you could put a cartoony drawing of an actual king in the logo (or, in the RiverKings' case, a cartoony drawing of Elvis, though that might get them sued). Fortunately, nobody does that. Instead, everyone sticks to crowns.

Under other circumstances I might say this is a team that needs to change its name. But given the Elvis connection, I like the name too much to suggest this (although I think they should revert to Memphis RiverKings). So perhaps the current logo is the best approach. I might say otherwise if the team had proven it could come up with a different sort of logo that wasn't awful, but past history has shown they can't.

Final Score: 32 points.
Penalties: Region (egregious), 5 pts; Kings, 8 pts; Compound, 13 pts; Wordplay, 7 pts; Name-Logo, 2 pts.
Bonuses: Local, -3 pts.


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