Indy Fuel

27

Indianapolis. It's hardly "Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg" in terms of length, but as far as sizeable cities go, it's fairly long. At six syllables, its name is longer than the name of any United States city which is bigger. In all of minor league hockey, the only other city whose name is that long is Oklahoma City, and even that one sort of cheats by having "City" in the name. Although now that I think about it, the "-polis" in "Indianapolis" is just Latin for "City", so forget I called Oklahoma City out on that.

In any case, "Indianapolis" is a long enough name that the owners of their new hockey team decided it would take too long to say, so they decided to use "Indy" instead of "Indianapolis" in their official name. Indeed, the owners were so traumatized by the length of their city's name that they chose a one-syllable nickname. Well, maybe two syllables; there seems to be some disagreement as to whether "fuel" has one syllable (/fjul/) or two (/fju əl/), and I don't know how the owners pronounce that word. I asked my wife how her dad, who grew up in Indiana, pronounces the word "fuel", and her response was that he pronounces it "gas". Very helpful, my wife is.

Going out of your way to make certain your team name is only half (or two thirds) as many syllables as the city your team is in speaks of a certain attitude which straddles the line between laconic and just plain lazy. The logo, it must be said, hints at the latter. Fuel, being a clear(ish) liquid, is hard to directly represent in a logo, but there are plenty of ways to indirectly represent it. The obvious one to me would be to include the handle of a gas pump — indeed, you could use one as the "F" in "Fuel". An entire gas pump would work, too, especially an old-timey one. And since the name is obviously inspired by the auto race that Indianapolis has, just about any racing-themed object (checkered flag, race car, race helmet, et cetera) would also work. So what the did team go with?

A puck. They couldn't even make it a tire, which would have been a bit of a reach but would at least have had some relation to fuel. They also threw three stars, two orange and one white, into the logo for reasons I can't pretend to understand. In fact, after reviewing so many Mexican League teams over in the Baseball section of this site there's a part of me that thinks it's presumptuous of them to do this when they haven't won three championships yet, but I'm reminding myself that this rule doesn't really apply in American hockey. The city flag, for what it's worth, does have a star, but just one; the city seal doesn't have any. I really have no idea what those stars are doing there. Maybe they just thought the logo needed someone else, and were too lazy to put much thought into it.

Yeah, looking at the rest of the logo and at the name, that's what I'm going with.

Final Score: 27 points.
Penalties: Region (well, not really, but I gotta penalize them somehow for not calling themselves "Indianapolis"), 3 pts; Singular, 6 pts; Irrelevance, 14 pts; Name-logo (quadruply egregious), 7 pts.
Bonuses: Local, -3 pts.