The kids really seem to love that Vancouver Canucks logo, my friend.
When you’re a small child, you don’t like a particular hockey team because of their style of play, their toughness, or even the players making up their roster. No, you do it for the most obvious, objective reason possible: Their cool colors and logo.
In that regard, there isn’t a cooler logo in the entire NHL – maybe in sports as a whole – than that of the Vancouver Canucks.
On paper, it really does check every box a fan, young or old, would enjoy. It features a tough, Haida-style representation of the team’s mascot, Fin the Orca, melded together with the letter C, which, as you know, is for Canucks. It’s perfect, original, and far superior to the logo the team was using pre-1997– which looks like it would be more in place on an Eagles of Death Metal album cover than a hockey jersey (don’t @ me).
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Now yes, for fellow 90s kids, the then-Mighty Ducks of Anaheim would have been the team for anyone with even a cursory interest in the sport and a working VHS player, but that name and iconography rapidly became associated with a Saturday morning cartoon more so than a professional hockey team in my personal headcanon. The Cancucks, with their shark/whale/bird/monster logo, was this strange Cthulhu-esque creation that I could barely wrap my head around.
But now, as a fully grown adult, I can fully appreciate the Vancouver Canucks for making one of the best rebrandings of any NHL team in the last 30 years – which is really saying something when you consider just how many teams have changed up their looks since the league expanded in 1996.
Is that a bold statement to make? Maybe. I fully accept that there is a ton of hate from long-term fans over the addition of the Orca logo, and for good reason. Any time an ownership group oversteps its bounds and attempts to run carte blanche on an organization, it’s going to rub fans the wrong way when it doesn’t result in wins. Orcas have nothing to do with the Canucks historically – which literally translates to a Canadian – and Johnny Canuck may simply be a better representation of the fanbase and franchise’s shared history.
With that being said, as a lifelong son of south-central Pennsylvanian, the Canucks’ current logo – and its various iterations since 1997 – holds a special place in my post-20th century hockey mind, even if that opinion is technically the wrong one according to ‘true’ fans. It’s a bold, ambiguous image that doesn’t really make sense in the context of the team – though, to be fair, I was today years old when I learned what Canuck even translates to – but is awe-inspiring nonetheless.
If you’ve ever seen a young child latch onto something for no other reason than that they think it looks cool, you know what I mean. Heck, I was a Miami Dolphins fan in elementary school because I liked the animal, not football – kids are weird.
Still not convinced that the Vancouver Canucks have the best logo in the NHL? Well, who am I to convince you otherwise. You may love their “The Flying Skate” look or wholeheartedly believe there’s a way to make a Johnny Canucks anthropomorphic mascot man look cool on a jersey. If that’s the case, I can’t argue one bit. All I can relay is that as a child, I thought the team’s current Orca logo was beyond cool, and imagine many other fans born in the post-grunge-era probably have similar fond memories. If that gets even a few more people into hockey, is that really a bad thing? Though I will say, an Orca logo in Flying Skate-era colors looks pretty darn cool too.
