THE SPORT COUNT

In the NBA, expansion is rare enough that you’re guaranteed to get excited by the horrendously hip names which owners come up with to try to captivate and invigorate a new market.

Toronto are still ruing the day that Sir Steven Spielberg decided to make Jurassic Park, and doomed them to be named after the bird like predators who hunted down Dr. Ian Malcolm and Co.

“What did you say they were calling us?”

So, what’s in a name? Well, the guys over at Sports Tech Now have put their nerd hats on and started to suss out prospective domain names for the new franchise… with interesting results:

OKCoutlaws.com and OklahomaCityOutlaws.com is owned by someone named Brian Campbell, OKOutlaws.com is owned by someone named Brandon Cecil but the domain now refers to Yahoo so one can only think that Yahoo Sports just purchased the name.  Besides that, the real interesting part is that OCOutlaws.com and OklahomaOutlaws.com is owned privately in Bellevue, WA.

We learn two things from this: 1. It appears as though Clay Bennett is playing siller buggers and registering names himself and 2. It looks like Outlaws is the run away favourite in internet land.

I think we can agree that the Outlaws is a pretty dumb name, so this is a good opportunity to run down some of the stupidest names in pro sports:

1. Toronto Maple Leafs | NHL

Seriously, you’re named after a leaf! Not even a tree, but a leaf! A leaf that people make syrup with and put on pancakes. A leaf!

The best thing about the Maple Leafs is that they’re not even an expansion team; they’re a long standing franchise who managed to get it wrong from day one.

2. Philadelphia Soul | Arena Football League

As a young league, the arena league were at a decided disadvantage; all the good names were taken by the WNBA and NHL expansion teams, so they had to use a bit of lateral thinking.

I don’t actually understand what this means. The music? The non-physical, spiritual or emotional centre of a person (Freud, 1927)? It’s all very hard to figure out, and you can imagine it’s even harder for the cheese steak eating afficionados of Philly’s burgeoning Arena Football League scene.

3. Young Boys Bern | Swiss Soccer League

Those crazy Swiss are good for a couples of things: isolationism, chocolates and perverted names for their soccer teams. The weirdest thing about this name is that it’s been around for 110 years, and has been sucking for exactly as long.

Seriously, must be very tough on their fans. They’d have to be the most accomplished Googlers.

4. Detroit Shock | WNBA

A stupid, but extremely apt. Probably born out of the fact that someone was literally surprised that women’s basketball necessitated a professional league.

5. Grasshopper Of Zurich | Swiss Soccer League

For the final round up of dumb names we go back to Switzerland, the largest city in the country. One of the cultural centres of the Western world, Zurich was the home to the world’s first publicly funded university and the city used all of its collective nouse to name their pride and joy football team after an unattractive and non-native insect: the Grasshopper.

Either some real idiots or some massive David Carradine fans were at work on that one.

Posted By: James

We’re keen to hear from you: all of the Count’s readers out there, what do you think?