Thunder announce D-League team renamed the ‘Blue’

Lol.

The Thunder officially announced on Wednesday the new name for their recently relocated D-League franchise, the Oklahoma City Blue. And that’s the new logo. Seriously. Not joking. That’s the logo that was attached to the press release I received. I even responded to it with “You sure?” That’s actually it.

The team was previously in Tulsa the last six years going by the 66ers. Because of leasing issues, the team is relocating to OKC this season and will play its home schedule at the Cox Convention Center.

Not that anyone should care too awful much about what a D-League team or logo looks like but yeeeeeesh.

Here’s the explanation for it:

“Blue is one of our primary Thunder colors, but it has become more than just a color for us. It has come to represent the passion, loyalty and unity of our fans and our community in their support for our team. Our players wear it proudly on their uniforms, our fans sport Thunder blue shirts, Thunder blue flags fly across Oklahoma and our statewide Blue Alliance fan groups show their connection to our team and what it stands for,” said Brian Byrnes, Thunder senior vice president of Sales and Marketing.

“It is only fitting that our development team, which is such an integral part of our organization, be called the Blue to represent the cohesion it has with the Thunder. We think this new name accurately reflects the enhanced unity between the two teams, which are now geographically and philosophically aligned in Oklahoma City and focused on development.”

So basically, they picked Blue because it’s one of the Thunder’s colors, some fans wear blue shirts, some car flags are blue and there’s a team licensed fan group that the organization created itself called Blue Alliance. Great reasons! Considering the Thunder have like 12 different colors in their logo, I’m sure it was a tough choice narrowing it down from the Blue, the Dark Blue, the Yellow, the Orange/Red and the White.

But the name is only the beginning. Because the logo has trumped all. It looks like it was created by someone pretty good at MS Paint in 1995. It honestly looks like it took 10 minutes tops to make. Probably not even that long for someone good at design, but then again, someone good at design wouldn’t have come up with that thing. It’s so bad that Basketball Twitter spent almost an hour completely skewering it today. Some of the best:

(A note: The D-League Twitter account tweeted a slightly different logo, that’s moderately improved. I’m told there a few different alternates created, but the one at the top is the official main logo.)

We shouldn’t be all that surprised with how comically horrendous the logo and name are. While the Thunder have built an unbelievably well run organization, that stops when it comes to names, jerseys and logos. The name “Thunder” has always been pretty terrible, as has the logo they hastily designed nearly seven years ago now. We’re just all used to them now. I mean, just remember that this is how they introduced the name Thunder. So much cheese.

I used to always think that the team was forced to rush out their jerseys and logos and never really had a chance to vet all their options. So when they announced an alternate uniform, I got really excited because I saw it as an open door to begin the subtle re-branding of the franchise. Except as you’d expect, the alternate jerseys completely missed the mark as well.

I have no idea what the thought process is in to this stuff. Knowing the Thunder, they probably did some kind of market research on how vanilla Oklahoma City is and how all the old white people would eat up how bland and boring it all is when it’s simply presented as being “communal.” The organization is never one that dares to be bold in any sense, so they aren’t taking any kind of risk when it comes to naming and branding a D-League franchise. Play it safe, play it safe, play it safe. In this case though, it’s backfired hilariously.