Coachella Valley Firebirds

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Until I found out about this team I thought the name of the Coachella music festival was something made up, like Lollapalooza. And yes, I know the founders of the Lollapalooza festival didn't make up the name themselves, but the point here is that I had no idea that there's an actual place called Coachella. It just has a made-up vibe about it, as if something started with the word coach and tried to spruce it up by adding the -ella suffix. And apparently if I tried to claim that's where the name came from no one could really prove me wrong, because it's one of those names where no one's really sure where it really does come from. The leading theory is that it's a mangling of the Spanish word conchilla, which refers to little shells which are found in the soil in the area. In any case, there's been a town with that name since 1901. Mind you, the hockey team isn't in the town of Coachella (population 42,000), because a city of 42,000 is too small to host an AHL team. Instead, the team is located in the unincorporated area of Thousand Palms, population 8,000. That makes a lot more sense.

Anyway, they decided to call themselves the Firebirds, and so the logo...well, come on, what do you expect the logo for a team called the Firebirds to look like? Do an image search on firebird and pretty much every image that comes up will look like— okay, that's not true. In fact you're going to get all kinds of things coming up because there are so many things named Firebird. Pontiac Firebird cars, Gibson Firebird guitars, Pivot Firebird bicycles, posters for the Stravinsky ballet...you get the idea. But if you actually manage to filter out everything except for drawings of actual birds, you find that there are basically only two concepts of what a firebird is. The first one is what you see here: a bird made out of flames. The other concept — particularly associated with Slavic folk tales — is a colorful bird with long tail feathers, with most of the colors being warm hues like red and orange and yellow. So basically whoever designed the logo pretty much had to use one of those two concepts as the basis of the logo, and let's face it, a bird where the fire is literal rather than just a reference to feather color is a hell of a lot cooler looking. So of course that's what the logo looks like.

But why the Firebirds name in the first place? Because they are affiliated with the Seattle Kraken, and thus wanted a mythological name. That of course leaves hundreds if not thousands of options, though, so why this one? Apparently they wanted to go with something that represented fire because the Kraken live in water and fire is the opposite of water.

I know you're probably reading that and thinking this is another one of my jokes, but it's not. The team really said that. They said that "the Firebirds embody the yang to the Kraken's yin". Seriously. So that's how you know this isn't one of my jokes. "yang to the Kraken's yin"? I couldn't make that shit up if I tried.

Is it a good logo? Well, it's basically perfect for a team called the Firebirds, so yeah, it's a good logo. No gratuitous hockey references, no goofy anthropomorphization, just a firebird for a team called the Firebirds. Got no problem with the logo. Got no problem with the name, either.

But this "embody the yang to the Kraken's yin" business? Yeesh.

Final Score: 0 points.
Penalties: Region, 5 pts.
Bonuses: Cool-Logo, -5 pts.