RealGM

5. New York Knickerbockers

What’s about to be revealed: I’m a sucker for names that double as descriptors, in some local dialect, for a group of people from that particular locality or tribe. Naming a sports team after the residents of its city binds players and fans in common cause, a unity of civic pride that seems almost impossible to achieve today with constant player movement and massive salaries that shift players onto a different plane of existence. The “band of brothers” effect of a Knickerbocker-type name is cool, even if we all know it’s false.

It’s true that “Knickerbocker” was originally a term for a pair of pants, rolled up at the ankles, that the 17th-century Dutch settlers of Manhattan apparently liked very much.3 But the term developed into something like an earlier version of “New Yorkers” — a collective term for the residents of what is now the world’s greatest city.

Washington Irving popularized it by using Diedrich Knickerbocker as a nom de plume in his history of the city; a cartoonish “Father Knickerbocker” became a popular character; and a local baseball team adopted the name in the mid-1800s. No NBA team name has a longer, prouder tradition.

The common shorthand, Knicks, works beautifully, and has the nice symmetry of the two K‘s. Problem: It’s hard to derive a mascot from a name that basically means “person from this region”; the Knicks don’t have an in-arena mascot. And what would it be? A Wall Street trader being led to minimum-security prison in handcuffs and a $10,000 suit? A walking yellow cab? An angry subway rider, furious that PEOPLE WON’T STEP INTO THE MIDDLE OF THE FREAKING TRAIN and that some jackass is playing his iPod so loudly the whole car can hear? A life-size rat? A person trying to fit a bed in a closet and yet somehow paying $1,000 per month for the privilege?

Sorry, I lost control for a minute there. The Knicks have a great name!

http://grantland.com/features/the-definitive-guide-nba-team-names-part-2/

GONYK wrote:

kfig5 wrote:[img]http://40.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mab2p1rp7c1r5by95o1_1280.jpg[/img]

I honestly think they should have used the bottom left logo, and added NEW YORK to the top of the wordmark.