Past Rebrand Thoughts

[MubbleFubbles 1,290]

So I’ve been here now for over 50 seasons so I’ve seen a fair share of rebrands and I can give quite a few thoughts on the ones that I’ve seen thus far. Before I begin though, one of the things I definitely like is how the VHL has shown restraint with rebranding teams over it's 90+ seasons. I remember the first ever player sim league I was in, it was called the International Sim League and it was a football (i.e NFL) sim and, while it went for 10+ seasons which was an incredible achievement at the time, boy did they not hold back with their rebrandings. I think only one of the six teams in that league stayed the same over the course of those ten seasons and funnily enough the one team that stayed was called the New Delhi Fighting Mongooses and their logo wasn’t even close to a mongoose (I think it was a green panther or something). Anyway, onto my thoughts.

 

The VHLM rebrands have all been pretty great in my eyes, although I guess there’s a caveat in that some of them started off with logos that were either god-awful (Halifax and Las Vegas) or questionable given the team name (Mexico City), but all of the logos that came from those rebrands looked pretty damn good. I think the only one that I’m meh on is the Ottawa Lynx one which, look I absolutely get the idea behind it, but I just wish the Lynx was doing something rather than just sat there staring.

 

The VHL rebrands I’ve been less sold on. I’ve covered them in other articles in the past so I don’t really want to re-tread old ground too much but I think the changes made to the Americans logo were bad and just didn’t fit the Americans and I still vastly prefer the old shield VHL logo to the current one. Which also brings up an interesting point, how many places on the forum do we even call the league by it’s full name anymore? I think the only place I’ve seen the full name used is the introductory PM, not even the welcome threads on the forum use the full name of the league. I wouldn’t be opposed to seeing “Victory Hockey League” actually written next to the graphic at the top of the site.

 

Teams that I’d like to see a full rebrand for? I don’t think any of the current teams desperately need a rebrand but there’s a couple that stand out, funnily enough they are a couple of the more recent teams to join the league as well. First one would be LA, I did like that we didn’t copy too much from NHL previously, but LA Stars just feels like someone merged the concept of a star with the Los Angeles Kings color scheme just because the Dallas Stars and the Kings were next to each other on ESPN. The other would be London United, I did a whole article explaining what I’d change and what I don’t currently like with that one though, I don’t need to elaborate further here.