Professional hockey in Northern California seemed like a pretty kooky idea back in 1990 when the National Hockey League, or the NHL, awarded San Jose an expansion team to start play the following year.
“Wall Street Journal, Business Week, New York Times, ESPN, CBS started calling and saying, ‘God, hockey in California? In Northern California?'” said Matt Levine, the franchise’s second employee ever.
He was responsible for all business and marketing operations, and first among those was coming up with a name for the team.
Levine and his team came up with six criteria that any team name would have to meet:
- Had to have a regional connection
- Had to be a unique name in all of sports
- Had to be emotionally charged and exciting
- Had to lend itself to “imaginative graphic interpretation”
- Had to suggest qualities you’d want in a hockey player and team
- Could not be shortened in a headline
Those criteria produced 200 names internally, including Blades, Sharks, Stingrays and several names with the prefix “cyber” in homage to Silicon Valley and the nascent tech industry. But the team decided to widen the net and hold a “name the team” sweepstakes.
Levine put a simple ad in these three local newspapers: The San Francisco Chronicle, the Oakland Tribune and the San Jose Mercury News.
“The responses started coming in and they were the wildest of names,” Levine said.
The team received around 6,000 responses from around the world with more than 2,300 different name suggestions including Saddlesores, Integrated Circuits, Rubber Puckies, Screaming Squids and Salty Dogs. Someone even suggested calling them the Cansecos after then-Oakland A’s slugger Jose Canseco.
“There was a young man up in Vancouver B.C. who submitted 250 names, and he said one of these names has to be the one you’re going to select,” Levine said with a laugh.
The top 15 suggestions, in alphabetical order, were: Blades, Breakers, Breeze, Condors, Fog, Gold, Golden Gaters, Golden Skaters, Grizzlies, Icebreakers, Knights, Redwoods, Sea Lions, Sharks and Waves.
The most common name suggested was the Blades, but it didn’t fit Levine’s criteria. It wasn’t that exciting, and they found in focus groups that people associated it more with gangs than with ice skating. So they moved onto the second most suggested name: Sharks.
With an exciting name in tow, now it was time to work on a logo.
Working with a graphic designer, Levine and the team came up with the concept of a Shark coming out of a triangle. That’s when Levine remembered that the Bay Area is part of the so-called Red Triangle that is home to a high number of great white sharks.
“So all of a sudden the shark, the triangle had a reason,” Levine said, “and we can have the shark coming out of the triangle.” As an added bonus, the triangle could also represent the three largest cities in the Bay Area: San Jose, San Francisco and Oakland.