G-League Logo Rank, Part 2

Last week I published the first in a series of three posts ranking team logos of the 26 teams that make up the G-League or Gatorade League, the minor league farm system of the NBA, formerly known as the NBDL. I took on the eight worst (in my humble opinion) packages of logos adopted by the teams that make up that league. Here's part two, which also features eight not so good but certainly better than last week's logos. Once I'm done here, I'll conveniently have ten logos remaining for a triumphant top 10 in next week's post.

Enough gold plating something that has really no importance whatsoever but which strangely means something to me in the dead of summer when there's no NBA. Let's start in Grand Rapids.

18. Grand Rapids Drive

In part one of my G-League Logo Rank, I mentioned that I sketched the initial draft of this post series some months ago. In the first pass, the Grand Rapids Drive, which have pulled together a really pretty awesome looking primary logo with an absolutely abominable wholely unnecessary jumbo "GR" as their secondary look, were actually ranked much higher. So why the drop? Turns out it's because of what their parent club the Detroit Pistons went and did.

Let me explain. I love the old Detroit Pistons logo that the team used from 1979 to 1996. The complete loss of that logo in favor of (initially) a fire-breathing horse with tailpipes and a subsequent plain looking basketball with some strangely fonted arched wordmark over it was distressing to me. The only thing that came close to that classic look was the Drive's main logo. And I loved it (still do). But now the Pistons have adopted a logo that's closer in appearance to the 80s and early-90s one than the Drive's. Consequently the Drive's logo just ain't that great for me and the absolute horrorshow that is the giant "GR" becomes more dominant. I'm maybe being a bit unfair to the Furniture City (I'm serious with that name) but whatever. Get rid of the "GR" please.

17. Salt Lake City Stars

Does the Salt Lake City Stars logo seem unusually small to anyone or is it just me. Check out the full selection of primary G-League logos on Chris Creamer's sportslogos.net site and tell me it doesn't. Other than the Northern Arizona Suns (terrible name), the Stars' logo is way smaller than any other team's. I think that's the first thing that bothers me. It shouldn't because taken in isolation the Stars' logo is neither bigger nor smaller than anything. But it does all the same.

As a logo, the Stars look isn't all that bad. But it isn't all that good either. It's just a star with a basketball in front of it and another couple of stars on either end of the wordmark. Ironically (considering where this sort of thing got the Grand Rapids Drive and Texas Legends) the Stars might actually benefit from a secondary logo. Maybe something a little more exciting. Two thumbs sideways here.

16. Long Island Nets

Speaking of not all that bad, but not all that good either, let's take a look at the Long Island Nets. If there's a traditional logo that looks like it was borrowed from another decade and another sport, it's the Nets' look. This simple basketball with a script "Nets" written in front of it looks like it could be straight out of Major League Baseball in the 1970s. Not much more to say here. The Nets have crafted something innocuous enough not to be marked down for being bad but without much merit deserving of praise.

15. Erie Bayhawks

Last December I made it to my first Erie Bayhawks game. A couple of weeks later I found out the team had been sold to the Orlando Magic, which meant the complete death of yet another longstanding independent team before the one-to-one affiliations and outright ownership by NBA parent teams began to consume the league. For the Bayhawks, it meant that the 2016-2017 season would be their last. No more Bayhawks. No more complicated but independently proud Bayhawks logo.

Since my trip to Erie, the Bayhawks have moved to Lakeland, Florida and have become the Lakeland Magic. Yet the Bayhawks remain for one final season because the Atlanta Hawks' G-League franchise doesn't have a building to play in yet. So they agreed to stash the team in Erie under the old Bayhawks name. It's an odd circumstance that has nothing to do with ranking the team's logo, which is neither that good nor that bad. This is likely the Erie Bayhawks will be featured in any logo rank and I think that's sad.

14. Rio Grande Valley Vipers

The Vipers, just like the Bayhawks, are one of the holdovers from the pre-NBA team ownership era of the G-League (or the D-League actually), a team with a name not aligned with any NBA team's branding in a city somewhat far from the home club. Only their logos are better than those in Erie.

The primary logo is the best Vipers look here, a basketball (which oddly enough is one of the microfiber composite basketballs the NBA rolled out in 2006 and then kicked to the curb on January 1, 2007) with a viper, which are endemic to the Rio Grande Valley where Hidalgo (the Vipers' home town) is located, wrapped around it. It's well designed and proportioned and makes me believe that one of these things could wrap itself around a ball as a hands-off-this-is-mine gesture.

The secondary logos are less successful, mostly because the snake looks really stubby. There's not way a normal snake body is present between the head and tail in the alternate logos.

13. Sioux Falls Skyforce

The Skyforce are one of the G-League's oldest franchises, tracing their lineage all the way back to the old Continental Basketball Association in 1989 with no change in location or naming (although they flexed on the color) despite the fact that the Miami Heat moved into single affiliation status in 2013. They are one of the league's true survivors. For now.

There's not much to the Skyforce's logo. It's a simple basketball moving at rate of speed high enough to cause some sort of warped matter trail as it moves from left to right and down to up. It worked better with the team's old colors in my opinion (I've included the new scheme above and the original at the top of this post) but the Heat color scheme doesn't detract from the look that much. Simplicity (and my insistence on letting nostalgia for the good old days of the D-League and before) puts the Skyforce just inside the top half at 13.

12. Austin Spurs

I like the San Antonio Spurs logo. I like it so much that I've put it in the sixth position in my NBA logo rank each of the last three years. As much as I do like it though, I don't need to give that organization credit for just duplicating their look and foisting it on their minor league Austin-based franchise. It is as close to the original look as it could possibly be. The Spurs finish here because of just plan lack of originality.

11. Iowa Wolves

This offseason the Minnesota Timberwolves re-branded themselves completely. Well, maybe not completely because they still have the same nickname and their howling wolf logo looks suspiciously like previous howling wolf logos they have used. But they changed their color scheme a little, the wolf looks decidedly less rabid than he or she did in the past and their look now prominently features a four pointed north star in some sort of deep chartreuse color

Turns out the Timberwolves want the same look for their newly acquired G-League in Des Moines, the former Iowa Energy and now the Iowa Wolves. No howling in this one. Instead the wolf is looking straight at you and it doesn't look friendly. Not raving about the primary logo here; it's clearly a 2-for-1 special from the ad agency who redesigned the parent company's look. But I like the (again) map-based secondary logo if for no other reason than Iowa never seems to get a lot of pub as a state shown in isolation. I'm thinking the star is a bit too low for Des Moines, though.

16 down; 10 to go. I know all you G-League fans are already debating in your heads which of the remaining 10 franchises you'd put in which order. Eh, who's kidding whom. At least 90% of the people who will read this couldn't name five of the remaining 10 teams. If you are not motivated to look it up (and let's face it, who really is) stay tuned next week to this spot for the top 10.

Free Fries!

For the past few years now, the Washington Wizards and Chick-fil-A have been engaged in a promotional partnership. The deal is if a player on the visiting team misses two consecutive free throws during a single trip to the charity stripe in the last quarter of the game, all fans in attendance get a free chicken sandwich from a local branch of the restaurant chain sometime in the following week.

I love this promotion. It gets fans cheering and making noise while our opponents are shooting free throws towards the end of the game when every point counts. Yes, it's a little shameful that this opportunity for some free grub gets the notoriously silent and indifferent crowds at Verizon Center worked up into a rabid frenzy. But look, noise is noise and I'd love it if the Wizards had a different sponsor behind a different giveaway related to free throw misses in every quarter. It might be complicated and less effective from an advertising standpoint, but we'd get the arena loud every quarter of the game. And let's face it, most nights the Wizards sorely need this.

Other folks don't love the Chick-fil-A sandwich giveaway as much as I do. The apparent contradiction between the home fans at VC making way more noise for a free piece of fried chicken on a bun than for the team itself has been covered in multiple news outlets including The Washington Post, USA Today and SB Nation. Again, I get that lack of crowd noise is a problem at Wizards home games; just don't blame Chick-fil-A for pointing it out. It's not like if they didn't have this promotion that the place would be loud all night long.

Last month, I took a trip out to Erie, Pennsylvania to watch the Erie Bayhawks, the city's NBA Development League team, play a game on a Saturday night. And I have to tell you the Bayhawks and McDonald's have just the promotion that I wish the Wizards would have.

Here's the deal in Erie: if the opposing team misses five free throws at any point in the game, then each fan in attendance gets a small fries from an area McDonald's for free. Why is this better? Well quite simply because it works potentially throughout the entire game. From the very first trip to the line for any player on the visiting team, there's a possibility to get closer to the goal of free stuff. Even if they miss the first free throw (which means no chicken for sure at VC), you can still cheer like crazy for a miss on the second during the fries promotion because each miss gets you closer to free fries.

Now I get it: a Chick-fil-A sandwich is way better than a small fries at McDonald's. Who even orders small fries anymore anyway? But why can't the Wizards get Mickey Ds to change their current McGriddles promotion (free McGriddles if the Wiz are ahead after one quarter) to a fries promotion based on free throw misses and have it count for the first three quarters only. I mean, who eats McGriddles? Does anyone like these things? It would be even sweeter if McDonald's made it a medium fries.

If the Wizards could make this change, we'd have some part of Verizon Center booing the opposition to get closer to free food every time they stepped to the line. McDonald's would take care of the first three quarters and Chick-fil-A would still get the fourth. I'd make this change in a heartbeat if I was running things. Some folks are still going to hate it. I love anything that gets people to make noise in support of the Wizards at home. For my part, I'll continue to boo for missed free throws in the final quarter, even though I've never cashed in on free chicken and realistically probably never will. Go Wizards!

The Bayhawks' Last Stand

 

Last month I took a quick trip to eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania to watch some NBA Development League hoops. This is not the first trip I've taken a trip to watch minor league basketball and I don't expect it will be the last.

Each time I've seen a game in some new town, I've written a blog post about my experience where I've chronicled the history of the home team; talked about the arena; and maybe elaborated on one or two experiences while I was in town that made me feel like I was in a unique place in the United States. There's sort of a formula to those posts. I did that last week when I wrote about our first D-League stop on that trip in Canton, Ohio.

But my plan for writing about my trip to Erie, Pennsylvania to watch the hometown Bayhawks take on the Westchester Knicks was a bit different. I was going to go off script a little and use my trip there to talk about something else. And that was whether a franchise like the Erie Bayhawks was likely to survive what is happening in the current NBDL as the league expands and its members are more often that not wholly owned subsidiaries of NBA teams. But then the Orlando Magic beat me to it and announced last month that starting with the 2017-2018 season, the Erie Bayhawks would be moving to Lakeland, Florida, presumably with a new name since Lakeland does not sit on a bay.

I think the Bayhawks moving to Florida is tragic. Yes, I know it's only minor league basketball and that Cleveland is about an hour away if someone from Erie wanted to go to an NBA game. But sports are important to communities and stripping a town of a professional sports team, no matter how minor league it is, is not something to be celebrated.

Let's take a look back at how we got here. The NBA Development League started as the National Basketball Development League in 2001 with eight teams located in the southeast of the United States and none of these teams was owned by an NBA franchise. Sure the league had the endorsement of the NBA and operated on a sort of a farm system basis by allowing NBA teams to assign players to the D-League but there was little actual visible meddling.

I believe one of the original ideas behind locating the NBDL in the southeast U.S. was that the NBA saw an area of the country mostly crazy about college hoops completely underserved by professional basketball of any sort. With the Continental Basketball Association already in place in the midwest, the NBA chose southern Virginia, both Carolinas, Alabama and Georgia as the place to start its league. It wouldn't stay there long. There's only so much chance of making two pro hoops teams in Alabama viable year after year. To that point, once of the two Alabama teams (the Mobile Revelers) failed after just two years, along with the Greenville (SC) Groove.

In 2005, four years after its first season, the D-League expanded back to eight teams and moved west, adding one team each in Fort Worth, Texas and Little Rock, Arkansas and seeing three of the original eight teams move to New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. A year later, they would expand into the midwest, the Continental Basketball Association's territory, when the CBA's Sioux Falls (SD) Skyforce, Dakota Wizards and Idaho Stampede jumped ship from the then in trouble and ultimately failing league.

At the start of the 2008-2009 NBDL season, things seemed to have settled down. The D-League had expanded to an all time high 16 teams despite the loss of the remaining three original teams and the demise of the Fort Worth and Arkansas franchises after just two seasons. It seemed like the league had a comfortable footprint nationwide and the instability that had characterized the league's first few years seemed to be in the past. Sure the Anaheim Arsenal moved to Springfield, Massachusetts after that season and the Colorado 14ers went bust but the addition of the Maine Red Claws got the league back to 16. No worries, right?

Over that period of the D-League history, three of the teams in the league had been sold to NBA franchises. The Los Angeles Lakers bought the Los Angeles D-Fenders; the San Antonio Spurs purchased the Austin Toros and the Oklahoma City Thunder acquired the Tulsa 66ers. For the first time in D-League history, teams were single affiliated with an NBA franchise which allowed the franchise to install the big league offensive and defensive schemes at the minor league level and really develop their D-League assignees in a targeted fashion. It just so happened that the teams these three franchises bought were located close to the parent team's city.

Say goodbye to the bouncy castle, children of Erie. The Orlando Magic don't care.

Then in 2010, something different happened. Donnie Nelson, an executive with the Dallas Mavericks and son of legendary NBA coach Don Nelson, moved the Colorado 14ers (he had bought the defunct franchise a year prior) to Frisco, Texas, just a little more than 25 miles from Dallas and the Mavericks became exclusively aligned with the minor league franchise. This was different than a team buying a local team and keeping it in the city where it was before the purchase. Now, an NBA team had moved a D-League franchise to be super close to the NBA team's home.

It caught on. Two years later the Golden State Warriors purchased the Dakota Wizards, a team that had been playing in Bismarck, North Dakota since 1995 (!!) and moved them to Santa Cruz, because they needed a team closer to them so they could develop their young players. 17 years in one place and then poof! Gone!

The race was on. Springfield Armor? Sold to the Detroit Pistons and moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan in 2014. Bakersfield (CA) Jam? Property of the Phoenix Suns and relocated to Arizona as the Northern Arizona Suns (yawn name!). What about the Idaho Stampede, another CBA-era team? Moved to Salt Lake City by the Utah Jazz. Then this season the Reno Bighorns became the property of the Sacramento Kings with a promise to move them closer to Sacto. Finally (although not really) it was the Erie Bayhawks' turn on December 14 of last year: moving to Lakeland, Florida effective 2017. 

Next year there will be no pro hoops in Erie, Pennsylvania. I'm sure not many people really care about that. I'm pretty sure the Orlando Magic don't care much at all. But I've been to Erie on a game night (as I had been to Springfield three seasons prior) and I've seen people from parking garages and restaurants and bars make their way to the Erie Insurance Arena to cheer on their Bayhawks. This stuff matters, folks. And right now the NBA teams are focusing all their energy on moving local franchises as close to their home arenas as possible. And I don't hold with it.

As of the beginning of the 2017-2018 NBA Development League season, there will be just three D-League teams located more than 150 miles from their parent clubs: the Rio Grande Valley Vipers (about 350 miles from Houston); the Iowa Energy (600 or so miles from Memphis); and the Sioux Falls Skyforce (more than 1,000 miles from Miami). Watch out Sioux Falls; you are probably going to lose your team at some point very soon.

I loved visiting Erie for an afternoon and evening. The Bayhawks, despite giving up an early and seemingly insurmountable lead to the visiting Westchester Knicks fought back hard (with maybe a little help from the refs) and had a chance to win it at the end. Despite the bottom of the league status of the team, the Bayhawks' faithful (including me, sometimes between bites of the arena's poutine) made a ton of noise for the team that night. Next year, it troubles me that those same fans won't have a team to root for. I think it's great that the NBA Development League is evolving into a true minor league; I'm just not happy about the effects on small cities like Erie.

Poutine in Erie. Way better than Verizon Center's version of a couple of years ago. Closer to Canada, eh.