Kansas City Mavericks

45

Sometimes these reviews serve a useful purpose, sort of. In this case, it convinced me to finally look into something I've wondered about for years, which is why there's a city in Missouri named after Kansas, and why it's bigger than its name-sharing partner just across the state line. I'm sure plenty of people who live in that part of the country have known this for as long as they can remember and are agog at the idea that other Americans might not know that, but in fairness I ask these people: can you tell me why there's a North Carolina and a South Carolina rather than just a single Carolina? Because that's something that everyone from either of those sta— actually, now that I think about it I don't know that one, either. So, yeah, go ahead and look at me like I'm an idiot.

[One quick Wikipedia perusal later]

Oh, that's right. I knew that once, I just forgot. Basically there were two settlements in Carolina (Charleston and Albemarle, the latter being in the northeastern part of present-day North Carolina), and it was really difficult to travel between the two because the land route was full of swamps and American nations who weren't fond of all these light-skinned assholes, while the sea route was so dangerous it would soon pick up the nickname "Graveyard of the Atlantic". So the people in charge of the colony figured the easiest thing to do was just split it in two. Anyway, back to Kansas City.

So, first of all, Kansas City isn't named after the state of Kansas. It couldn't be, because the city is older than the state. At the time that white people first settled in the area, it was part of the Missouri Territory, which basically covered the entire Louisiana Purchase except for the actual state of Louisiana (which already existed by this point). The settlement had a couple of different names early on, but soon after the state of Missouri was let into the union, the settlement settled on the name of Kansas after the Kansas River, which meets the Missouri River in the vicinity (the actual confluence is just outside of Missouri in what was then an unorganized territory and is now the state of Kansas, but the distance from the confluence to the state line is barely longer than a football field). The settlement was incorporated as the Town of Kansas in 1850 and upgraded to the City of Kansas three years later.

As for Kansas City, Kansas, I'm not sure when it was settled (or, more likely, when the settlement of Kansas on the other side expanded until it crossed the state line), but in 1857 the town of Wyandotte (located right at the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri rivers) was incorporated. Kansas City, Kansas was incorporated in 1872, and in 1886 Kansas City, Wyandotte, and a few other cities merged into a newer, bigger (but not as big as what the city across the line) Kansas City.

Okay, so that's it for our history lesson. The Kansas City Mavericks are, of course, the renamed Missouri Mavericks. (The Mavericks play in Independence, Missouri, a suburb of Kansas City, so they probably should have been called the Kansas City Mavericks all along.) Their logo is an update to the Missouri Mavericks logo, which means that it has most of the shortcomings of the Missouri Mavericks logo. There's the weird orange-and-light-blue color scheme. And there's the horse. Mavericks, for the record, are not horses (they're unbranded cattle). The logo no longer has the horse's body, which is a good thing (it had some really strange foreshortening going on), but now the horse is framed by a circle, which is incredibly boring. Oh, and that orange mane on the horse. Eight seasons ago when the Missouri Mavericks debuted I'm sure no one thought anything about it, but today it looks, um, vaguely political, if you catch my drift. I'm not sure there's much they could have done about that without drawing more attention to it than leaving it alone draws, but it is unfortunate.

I personally think they should have taken the opportunity to completely re-do the logo. This one may not be worse than the old one, but it's not really any better, either. But hey, at lease the name is slightly improved! That's something, I guess.

Final Score: 45 points.
Penalties: Cartoon, 17 pts; Anthropomorphization (egregious...note the eyes), 15 pts; Irrelevance, 14 pts; Name-Logo, 2 pts.
Bonuses: Local, -3 pts.