The Utah Hockey Club officially named itself the Mammoth today, and yeah, it’s bad. Very bad. It’s bad, I hate it, and it’s bad.
Mammoths would be great. Maybe with a logo that actually looks like a woolly mammoth? Spectacular.
Mammoth is not great. Mammoth is an affront to multiple species of mammals, some of which are extinct.
I don’t know why teams are naming themselves singular words, but I think it goes back to the Thunder. Oklahoma City named its basketball team the Thunder, the Thunder became a success, and someone who’s never held a conversation outside of a conference room saw the correlation and went for it. That someone is probably the consultant Seattle and now Utah have used for their NHL naming efforts. If that someone gets hired when Major League Baseball expands, I’m going to subscribe to ISIS’s YouTube channel.
Thunder is a fine name for an NBA team in Oklahoma City. I have no quarrel with Thunder. You never refer to a bunch of thunder as “thunders,” it’s locally relevant, and it’s a weird but tasteful allusion to the Sonics. (Because sound, you know?) Similarly, Kraken isn’t the worst name for an NHL team in Seattle. All dictionaries list “krakens” as the plural for “kraken,” but some also list “kraken” as a plural version of itself. Also, Seattle’s a 48-year-old accountant trying to be Portland. Let Seattle have its fun.
Mammoth, though, is wrong. Mammoth is inappropriate. Mammoth disgusts me, and it should disgust you too. Mammoths? Great. Woolly Mammoths? Much better, but I’m willing to meet in the middle. Mammoth? Terrible. Despicable. The kind of thing that makes you wish the Salt Lake was still a Salt Ocean so we wouldn’t even have to look at these people.
When I first saw the team suggest “Mammoth” as a name, I thought there might be another definition of “mammoth.” Maybe there was a certain type of snowstorm called a “mammoth,” or it was a wave of skiers or something. Today, I saw the logo, and nope. They’re talking about the animal. Or at least they think they’re talking about the animal. What they drew looks less like a mammoth and more like a Nashville Predator with some mountains implanted under its scalp like Neuralink. The Mammoth logo is one of the worst offenses of the whole thing. An “M” made of two mountains would be tolerable. This thing? Demonstratively dumb.
I usually like the state of Utah. It’s a top-ten state for me, if not top-five. But between this and that **c******* Mark Harlan throwing Craig Smith under the bus (this is a college basketball reference), I’m starting to worry about our western neighbors. Visit Zion and Moab while you can. Soon they’ll be named the Dragon, singular, and their logo will be a Tyrannosaurus Rex with skis instead of claws.
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