"Sound" is one of the more flexible words in the English language. It has several definitions which are, for the most part, completely unrelated — to make a noise, the noise being made, a body of water, healthy, and probably one or two others I could find if I felt like travelling the ten feet or so between me and the nearest dictionary.

You can make all sort of neat mental images by trying to figure out which meaning the owners of Bridgeport's hockey team intended when they came up with the name "Sound Tigers". My personal favorite is the image of a tiger drowning in the water as it frantically and unsuccesfully tries to swim.

Interestingly, this is the meaning of the word "sound" that they actually had in mind.

I suppose that on some level, I should actually give some credit to this absolutely terrible name. Most of the really bad compound names are either "Ice" something or something "Kings". The Bridgeport Sound Tigers do at least avoid these two pitfalls. But that does nothing to change the fact that it is an extremely stupid name.

What really kills me about this is that there's no real need for the "Sound" in this team name. "Tigers" by itself would be a good name -- one of the classics, and (oddly enough) one not being used by a professional hockey team anywhere in North America. It even has a local meaning, serving as a nod to former mayor P.T. Barnum. The team could have taken this nice, classic name, and found a nice, classic logo to go with it.

Instead, we get a drowning cat.

I should note, incidentally, that althought he tiger in this logo clearly looks like he's drowning, tigers can swim. There are even videos of tigers swimming on YouTube. This shouldn't really surprise you, as there are quite literally videos of grass growing on YouTube as well.

Watching this video recently led to a conversation at work where we tried to figure out whether a human could, if the need arose, outswim a tiger. The discussion went into all sorts of ridiculous details such as various styles of swimming and which ones a tiger could and could not perform, body fat ratio, how much drag the fur would create, etc. The problem was, despite multiple searching on the web for about twenty minutes (and no, it wasn't a slow day at work), none of us could find the speed of a swimming tiger.

When I have a question about animals that I don't know the answer to, my usual approach is to ask my wife. So I shot an e-mail to her. Her response? "I'm not sure, but it wouldn't matter because the crocodiles would eat the human first." Apparently any places that you're likely to find a tiger swimming, you're also likely to see a crocodile...or more accurately, you won't see the crocodile, at least not until it's too late.

Anyway. The logo is far from great, but it's still better than it used to be. The original logo was the same as this one, but with a different color scheme. What is now grey was light blue, what is now dark blue was black, and what is now orange was — get this — medium blue.

Yes: A blue tiger. The current logo looks like the tiger is drowning, but the old one looked like he was freezing, too. I suppose Long Island Sound is pretty cold, but still. I have to say, though, that I may actually like the old logo better. Obviously a tiger should be orange. But blue is my favorite color and orange is my least favorite. So in making the logo more accurate, they also made it less attractive.

Still, it is an improvement even if I prefer the old one. It's still not a good logo, but it is an improvement. I'll give them that much.

Final Score: 21 points.
Penalties: Compound, 13 pts; Name-Logo, 2 pts; Yucky-Logo, 5 pts; Yucky-Name, 4 pts.
Bonuses: Local, -3 pts.