Starting a new team in an organized sports league is hard, and that's after you round up the money to bribe all the other rich people that you’ll need to join the group. There is also the vital matter of the team nickname, which is how and why we have arrived at the Boston Lega . . . Leg . . . Llllll . . . nope. Can't do it. Don't even want to try. It's not worth taking seriously on any level, with all due respect to the people who delivered it. Those people did their best, twice, which is the troubling part. You only get one chance to get a nickname right, and you can't get it back no matter how many do-overs you ask the audience to allow in search of that one chance.
The new NWSL franchise in Boston has unveiled their official do-over after the hilarious yet horrific BOS Nation debacle, and credit where it’s due: they started well enough with their choice of Sharpie Highlighter Green as a team color. Green is an underused and therefore fine idea; the color has been an out-of-fashion athletic choice since organized sport began, on both sides of the gender, geographical, and even oceanic barriers, and even now green is used in barely 10 percent of the college and pro teams in the major sports. The praise sadly must end there.
The folks in Boston's marketing department that mangled the first try at a team name have now mangled the second by making a series of preposterous miscalculations, starting with the collective noun error. New teams across the athletic spectrum do this because...well, because they're twerps, mostly. We hate them for it, but that's an us issue, and not really worthy of further delving for that reason.
True, some franchises have overcome this singular noun issue, but only through decades of sheer repetition. Think of the Jazz, which was kind of catchy and even bold for 50 years ago when it was the name of a team in New Orleans. It became a true masterpiece of cultural dissonance when the team moved to Sale Lake City that neither Karl Malone nor John Stockton at their best could overcome. For the most part, though, the singular nickname has become a modern affectation that fails more often than not. The Fever? Caitlin Clark is making her pro name on a team whose nickname sounds like a norovirus symptom, and no matter what she does as a pro that will never not be true. Let that rattle around your head awhile.
This is not a hard and fast rule, but the only way a singular noun nickname works is if it can be shortened to the much friendlier plural, as in New York Liberty turned to Libs. Easy on the tongue, playful, even sprightly, and the torch logo is easy to imagine as opposed to, say, the WNBA expansion Toronto Tempo, which is a disaster all the way down to the logo itself—a T with motion lines behind it, the laziest kind of don't-pay-the-artist-the-full-rate hackery. What will be the shortened nickname, there? The Temps? The ‘Po? Could there be a worse idea?
Of course, the answer to that is "yes, of course." Just give it time, as we did with Boston. Spontaneous genius comes only after months of workshopping, but that workshopping cannot and must not end with something like this.
And yet here we are. Boston has now missed twice despite having a year to figure it out. You have to hit on this kind of thing right away—an example: the WNBA expansionist Golden State Valkyries—which means that you have to plan for months to be able to hit on it right away. There is nothing about Valkyries that is particularly indigenous to the Bay Area, with all due respect to our Scandy friends out there, but it has a ring that works either in full or in shortened form (Valks? Yeah, Valks), and the "Ballhalla" campaign they just kicked off sounds just cheeky enough for a team that will spend its first few years getting clobbered. Boston Legacy (this was inserted by an editor, as the author could not bring himself to type it), by contrast, has the sound of a franchise waiting to be relocated to Montpelier.
This is not a new-team issue either. The Washington Slurs/Football Team/Commanders have known that their original name was a bad idea even before Danny Snyder turned everything else into a bad idea in 2000, and they needed two full years of pure generic—Washington Football Team, apparently because TK FC didn’t take up enough space on a t-shirt—before seizing upon Commanders, or Commies, as too many people try to graft upon them unironically. That name, while an improvement on the previous absence thereof, has remained an embarrassment that only Jayden Daniels winning the Super Bowl can possibly solve.
The Utah Hockey Club conundrum is even more contrived because while owner Ryan Smith could scrape up a billion dollars in a hurry to buy the Arizona Coyotes—good nickname, good colors, good logo, bad team, really bad owner—he needed a year to gimmick up fan polls to name the team, and until then has been content with an acronym usually found wrapped around a space heater cord—UHC. Another rule of thumb: If you're trying to convince people to pay extortionate prices to watch a team that has made the playoffs five times in this century and will probably miss them again this year, you clearly don't respect their judgment and shouldn't be asking them to brand your company. Besides, the city name attached to FC (or HC in Utah's case) is a soccer affectation that long ago lost its utility and has been brutally abused and misused by the creative gerbils at MLS.
Finally, the Bostons used their nickname to lead with the one thing that they, as an expansion team, don't actually have—a history. They wanted to get to the end rather than celebrate the reality of the immediate, and they went with a misleading nickname that, even worse, can only be shortened to Legs. At the risk of sounding like Doctor Get Of My Lawn, we rest our case.
