Clearly you never lived there otherwise you would have said “GO STILLERS” n’nat.
New York Yankees, New England Patriots, Dallas Stars (a reference to Texas’s star, but a “national” symbol in that sense) Washington Nationals, Washington Capitals, Philadelphia 76ers, Philadelphia Eagles, Columbus Blue Jackets, and I won’t even try to list them all in big time NCAA sports.
Is Maple Leafs really worse than “76ers”? Come on.
:rolleyes: yinzers 
That is my point - no worse but no better as well. And equally open to ridicule and abuse. It was LEAFFAN who tried, in a manner of speaking, to claim otherwise. If - and its a big “if” - the Maple Leafs were actually named for the Canadian flag as he asserts the equivalent to us would be “Old Glories” or possibly “Stars and Stripes” and I can’t find in a fast google even a high school team so named.
As for the various “national symbols” you list, I fall back on my “Senators Defense” – get some average people across the country to name 5 Patriots or Texican founders. Those are no more National Symbols than Steelers, Iron Men, Indians, Talbots or whatever. One of the main reasons teams can get away with claiming them as their local symbols. And claim the team itself as a national symbol (IE - Dallas being “Americas Team”)
Or as a coworker just said - “lunchtime - jeet jet?”
:smack:
I never said that. The Leafs were founded decades before the flag.
As a national symbol, the maple leaf is pretty lame. Not as bad as Wales using the leek but still pretty bad. If the US picked the turkey as our national bird and we had a team called The Turkeys I’d expect that they would be ridiculed.
BTW to be pedantic, octopus is false Latin. The plural is octopodes.
Hey, I know this dates me, but I still remember the battles of the North Pole and the South Pole
Not exactly, “octopus” is from Greek and the Greek plural is “octopodes”.
In English, the most commonly accepted pluralization is “octopuses”.
The OED lists octopuses(common), octopi(false latin), octopodes(rare)
If, for arguments sake, octopus was from Latin it would be octopes with the plural octopedes.