Ranking the Five Worst Logos in Hockey: #3

Minnesota Wild


The Wild went for an abstract idea rather than an actual, tangible thing for their team name. Now it's not a bad name, the Wild sounds pretty cool, and it's at least as good as the Ducks and much better than the Blue Jackets (seriously, WTF kind of mascot name is that?). However, it's pretty hard to come up with a logo for an abstract idea. Apparently the designers who made the logo decided that a "Wild" is a cat-like looking thing with some Christmas trees in the background. The Wild picked a great color scheme (they pull of the Evergreen green and dark red better than the Devils did), but their logo leaves a lot to be desired. It's hard to tackle an abstract idea like the Wild, but if they couldn't have come up with something good, maybe they should have just spelled Wild or Minnesota diagonally across their jersey (I LOVE when teams do that). But no, they went with this animal/forest/desert moon hybrid and it just has too much going on.

Ranking the Five Worst Logos in Hockey: #4

In this installment of the worst logos in hockey, I'm taking a look at the New York Islanders. Their logo is one of the ugliest in the NHL. While the fact that they turn the Y in NY into a hockey stick is pretty cool, the Islanders color scheme is what kills the logo. I am not a fan of the orange and blue mixture that they have going on. It's an eye-sore. The Islanders current logo is a slightly darker shade of blue than their original logo (which also sucked).
The Islanders tried a new logo for a couple of years in the 90's, but the new fisherman logo was so bad that they reverted back to the circular logo that they currently have now. Here is the Fisherman logo that they used from 1995 to 1997:
No matter which direction the Islanders go, it seems, they can't figure out a way to mix blue and orange and come up with something that looks good. Hopefully they'll wise up and try a different color combination.

Ranking the Five Worst Logos in Hockey: #5

So one of the reasons hockey is my favorite team sport is that the logos are so much better than they are in any other team sport. The sweater allows the logo to be prominently displayed, so it is important that a team has an appealing logo. Over the next few weeks, I will be ranking my favorite five, and my least favorite five logos. Just because a team makes the list, it does not reflect how much I like the team or not. I am basing this solely off the logo design. I will start with my least favorite logos beginning with the fifth worst (#1 being the absolute worst) logo which goes to...

Buffalo Sabres



The Sabres logo is one of my least favorite logos in the NHL because of one factor: it looks like a yellow slug. I realize that upon further study, it is obvious that it is a buffalo and not a slug, but that brings me to my next point: you would never know that Buffalo were the Sabres from that logo. Nowhere on the logo do I see any reference to a curved sword. The logo is more geared towards the city in which the team plays, rather than their mascot (which is what the other 29 teams in the NHL try to depict with their logo). The Sabres had a nice mix of their city and their mascot with their original logo:
I don't know why they completely went away from the Sabre when they changed their colors back to blue and yellow.