Toronto’s getting a WNBA team, bringing the league to fourteen franchises beginning in 2026.
Let’s name it.
First, we need to remember that this isn’t supposed to only be Toronto’s team, at least to start. The ownership group has said they’ll play games in Montreal and Vancouver as well. This is Canada’s WNBA team. It’s Toronto-based, but it needs to be Canada’s team.
The basics are solid. You can’t go wrong with the basic. Otters. Foxes. Owls. Moose. Geese, especially if the team goes by Canada instead of Toronto (we would love this—we want more state-based and province-based and country-based team names). Any number of woodland creatures would make for a great WNBA nickname. Unfortunately, classic identities don’t seem to be the norm these days for naming teams. We’re about ten years from those coming back into style. Foxes would be great—they’re strong and fierce and feminine-coded, and they’d lend themselves well to logos and color schemes. But I don’t know that we’ll be able to sell this franchise on Foxes.
We don’t especially care about the feminine-coded piece of this. We don’t think that should be necessary. But, that’s been a theme over the years with WNBA team names, and the next expansion franchise to begin play—the Golden State Valkyries—just went with one of the most badass feminine icons available, a pack of Norse goddesses who guide the dead through Norse purgatory. If there is a cool name for the female version of a Canadian animal, we endorse it, but Cows, female moose, and Sows, female grizzly bears, will not go over well. (We’d love for them to use Grizzlies, but the NBA having a Grizzlies franchise already—one that originally came from Canada—bodes poorly for those chances.)
Another name that wouldn’t go over well is Beavers. Along with the Canadian Horse, I believe Beavers are one of only two animals the Canadian government has deemed national symbols of Canada. But, you can’t name a WNBA team the Beavers. It would be awesome, but you can’t name a WNBA team the Beavers.
We looked briefly into the Maple Leaf Tartan to see if it might offer any promise, but it looks like a lot of Canadian provinces (if not all of them) have their own tartan, and we weren’t seeing many Canadians rallying to the national plaid.
Could Valkyries be a blueprint? A pulse on where the league stands? You can’t go back to the Nordic well so soon after Golden State (even if Canada is much more Norse than California, once having a professional hockey team named the French word for Nordics), but the First Nations offer a few solid options. Ravens, like Foxes, are female-coded for some reason, and tend to be important figures in First Nations mythology. Seals are cool, and while we didn’t find anything about First Nations seal goddesses, there is a lot of indigenous history revolving around the seal.
Should the team spin off of Raptors? It could, but Dinos includes Raptors, which feels awkward, and we couldn’t think of another dinosaur or dinosaur-adjacent feature which clicked. Claws sounds like you’re talking about fingernails or lobsters. Tyrannosaurs is unwieldy.
Going the opposite direction from First Nations, you could try Victorians, but 1) that isn’t a good name, 2) naming your team after followers of a dead English queen is weird unless those followers were cool [and they weren’t], and 3) I don’t think the WNBA is going the opposite direction from First Nations. Sticking with history, you could go with the Freedom, in homage to Canada being slightly ahead of the U.S. on banning slavery, but for as admirable as Canada is for being early on that (and not needing to kill half a million young men to eradicate it), it was only seventy years earlier than America and forty years earlier than Britain. That’s generational, but it’s not like Canada was centuries ahead of the rest of the Western world. Also, Freedom is a lame name, and it’s too similar to Liberty, which the WNBA already has.
The only other one we came up with so far is Maples. It’s tall. It’s strong. It’s very Canadian. It does dovetail with the Toronto Maple Leafs, but the Maple Leafs often go by the shortened “Leafs,” and the franchise has far from monopolized the maple leaf symbol in the Great White North. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think Maples is distinct enough to play in Montreal and Vancouver.
My own rankings of our five candidates:
1. Beavers
2. Foxes
3. Seals
4. Ravens
5. Maples
What I think they’ll go with, from options we’ve uncovered:
1. Maples
2. Ravens
3. Foxes
4. Seals
N/A. Beavers
Nadal vs. Zverev
Speaking of women, Alexander Zverev has allegedly beaten up two of ‘em, and the fourth-ranked tennis player in the world will be going opposite the crowd favorite, retirement tour Rafael Nadal, in the first round of the French Open. Good vs. evil stuff. If you’re looking to get into tennis, this is either the worst or the best way to do it. The match time hasn’t been set yet. That feels dumb. They should have put a time on that thing as soon as the draw went that way.
In related news, tennis draws are dramatic! They’re like lotteries. I never put together how much like lotteries they are. I love lotteries. I think I love tennis draws? I saw a commercial earlier for an app where you can buy lottery tickets, and I googled it but didn’t download. I think this was responsible. Although it did say they offer a free first ticket…
Let Matt Rempe Kick Ass
Speaking of beating people up, the fallout from last night’s Rangers/Panthers game seems to be pointing towards the Rangers letting Matt Rempe loose to beat up Florida Panthers, or at least to try. For as cool as it would be to see Rempe shatter a glass panel with Sam Bennett’s face, it’d probably be a more balanced scrap than that.
I love this about hockey. I love that a team lost one game and everybody said, “You know, they have that guy who kicks ass. Maybe they should let him kick ass?” And nobody said, “No, you meatheads, they need to optimize their shooting angles and tinker with their third line and all these other nerdy things.” Instead, some people said, “That might backfire,” and more people said, “Yeah, that sounds cool. Let Rempe kill someone.” Hockey is the meathead’s last habitat.
Does Kyrie Irving Consider Himself American?
I realized later that this might not work out, because Nickeil Alexander-Walker is Canadian and Kyle Anderson is Chinese and Karl-Anthony Towns is Dominican (I knew Rudy Gobert was French—that much is obvious), but one suggestion I had last night for how the Timberwolves could have won the game was for Chris Finch to play his Americans Only card. This is a rare card, but Finch does have it, and it requires both teams’ foreigners to leave the court and allow only the Americans to play. He can only use it once, but once he uses it, it takes Luka Dončić out for the rest of the game.
Would it also take out Kyrie Irving? That’s what we don’t know. Because part of how the Americans Only card works is that every player has to go to the PA mic and say whether they’re American or not. Would Kyrie call himself American right now? On a microphone?
(This is the real cheat code of that card. The media takes the next morning would be something to behold. It’d transform the whole series!)
Etc.
Chicago:
- The Cubs went 0–2 against the Braves after I talked 24 hours ago about wanting to make fun of the Braves. Should have kept that to myself. My bad, everybody.
Burnley and the Ottawa Senators:
- The Czech Republic eliminated Brady Tkachuk and Team USA at hockey worlds, defeating the leaders of the liberated 1–0. Earlier, Ridly Greig didn’t see the ice for Canada, but old friend Nick Paul scored twice as Canada knocked out Slovakia, moving on to the semifinals.
- The Vincent Kompany hiring at Bayern Munich keeps marching towards a conclusion, but Craig Bellamy won’t be going with him, which seems to make the Welshman at least the slight favorite for the Burnley job. Given “Craig Bellamy” is a cool name and we originally hoped there’d be a Welsh EPL team back when we chose Burnley as our favorite in 2019, this is a positive development.
