Saturday, December 23, 2006

Naming Waterloo's New NHL Team

In the day and a half since I speculated that our local billionaire, Jim Balsillie, was going to buy my home town of Waterloo (pop. 100,000) our very own NHL team, I have learned that Pittsburg, the town most likely to lose an NHL team in the near future, is a hockey town, and the Pittsburg Penguins are an original NHL team. It seems unfair and cruel to strip their team away from them; I do not wish that on anyone.

So, moving on with my speculation that Jim Balsillie, local billionaire, is going to buy us an NHL team, I will pretend that he will buy a team from some southern US town that never gets snow and where nobody cares about hockey.

That said, it's time to start choosing a name.

I like "the Waterloo Menno Men" a lot, and the fan props would be great - the flat-brimmed black hats, the bonnets, the riding whips, and of course the orange triangles worn on the back. But I fear that there is some slight possibility of offence so I will drop that.

And the Waterloo Rimmers is out, out, out.

Given our local high tech sector and all the math and physics research going on around here, the Pi's would be obvious. (At my company, we get free pie every March 14 at one minute before 2 PM... 3.14159, get it... grooannn.) But you know, that's just a little too cutesy for me. If there was a math symbol named after some sort of fish or facial tick, that might be funny. Pi has sort of been done, if you know what I mean.

Of course Waterloo doesn't have to gobble up all the fame. Since we're part of an urban sprawl that is getting to be known as Grand River (as in Grand River Hospital and Grand River Transit Authority), we could always use that in the title. The problem might be that Grand River doesn't appear on any maps (other than as a river), but then, Waterloo doesn't appear on a lot of maps either.

Surrounding municipalities have been slaughtering tufted cormorants to help support our enormous Great Blue Heron population, so "The Great Blues" or "The Herons" might be good names. But on the birdie front, now that I think of it, the bird/fowl that defines us as Canadians is that lonely hooter of the northern plateau, the loon. "The Grand River Loons." I like it. Put it on the list.

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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Pittsburg isn't an original team.

Toronto, Montréal, NY Rangers, Detroit, Chicago, Boston

UWHabs said...

If we did get a team, I think we'd end up calling it the "Kitchener-Waterloo _____s", since Kitchener is probably the main source of people who would show up.

But for naming, I don't know what's special in the area to call it after, so we'd probably end up with a "Thrashers" or "Wild" type of name.

Anonymous said...

Didn't he shelf the whole idea of buying any NHL team? or was it just that he didn't think Pittsburgh was the right choice?

I doubt he'll do it though. Pittsburgh was the perfect team to buy. An old NHL team with lots of history and Sid the Kid.

If he backed out on Pittsburgh, one would think he's reconsidering the entire idea of any NHL buying. Then again maybe the Pens financial woes were just a little too risky.

C4SR said...

Maple Leafs.

It would be nice to see a team that could win the Cup use the name.