This stereotype, like the stereotype of the New Agey Californian or the racist Southern, may or may not be accurate. But one thing is for certain: neither the name nor the logo for this team do anything to dispel this stereotype.

Let's start with the name. Stars is the second most common name in the history of North American professional hockey, with thirteen teams having used that name. (The most common is Blades, with fourteen. And in case you're wondering, the other highly common names include the Falcons with twelve, the Knights with eleven, and a five-way tie between Clippers, Flyers, Rangers, Saints, and Tigers, all with ten). Using such a common name is not a mark of originality. Neither is using the name of your NHL affiliate. And to make it even more lemming-like, it's coming at a time when the trend is for more AHL teams to start using their affiliates' names (of the six AHL teams that use the same name as their affiliate, four of them have been doing so for less than five years).

And then there's the logo. Of the six aforementioned teams, only Providence and Worcester use a logo more similar to the affiliate's logo than the Iowa Stars do. Admittedly, using a different logo isn't necessarily a good thing (check out the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins and Binghamton Senators for two very good, very bad examples). But such a logo would at least make people think you had an original bone in your body, which this logo does not do. The minor differences between this logo and Dallas' logo just make it worse, in fact. It's as if someone said, "Maybe if we tilt the logo and use a slightly different font, it'll be original!" No, it won't. It will be be so close to the original that people will have to put the two side by side to see the difference. If they had simply used the same logo, people would have figured they were deliberately trying to use the same logo. Instead, it looks like they were trying to use a different logo and failed.

And as if all this didn't pound home the notion that Iowa is not a bastion of originality, consider this: this isn't the first time a team in Des Moines has been called the Iowa Stars. A team in the Central Hockey League -- then the top affiliate minor league for the NHL -- used the name in the 1969-70 season. So here we have a team using a name that a) has been used before in the same place, b) is the name of its NHL affiliate, and c) is the second most common name for North American hockey teams. There is so little originality involved here that I was tempted to just take my review for the Providence Bruins and replace all instances of "Providence" with "Iowa". But I decided against it.

After all, I'm not from the Midwest.

Final Score: 17 points.
Penalties: Region (egregious), 5 pts; Name-Logo (quadruply-egregious), 7 pts; Offspring, 5 pts.
Bonuses: None.