Is there any indication that they actually objected to the name “New England”?
There’s a long tradition in Ottawa sports of using red and black as the team colors, dating back to the city’s original (long-since failed) NHL franchise. The tradition was followed by the first two CFL franchises in the city, so when the team was revived for a third attempt, there was really only one name they could have chosen: the Ottawa Red Blacks. Makes me long for the days of Roughrider/Rough Rider games…
Arizonan here. The Coyotes and the Cardinals have both changed from Phoenix in their names to Arizona to appeal to a broader fanbase within the state. They want to appeal to fans living in Tucson, Yuma, and Flagstaff. Same strategy with the Arizona Diamondbacks. The Colorado Rockies want to reach fans in Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Fort Collins, and Grand Junction. It makes fans not living in the immediate area feel included. Makes sense to me.
I’ll keep that in mind when I purchase an NBA franchise. I will rename it the Milky Way Tigers or Milky Way Bulldogs or something.
On the other hand, this makes absolutely no sense when including fans within a team’s marketing region.
Yeah they don’t need to do that. I doubt that the reach of a team’s marketing is significantly affected by this.
Actually, the entire Rocky Mountain region has adopted the Rockies as their team. The TV and radio networks are from New Mexico to Montana. Whether the name was in any way responsible for it is an open question, but everyone calls them “The Rockies” and “Colorado” has all but been dropped.
That makes some sense, but I guess it depends on the team, and the fan base. The Seattle Seahawks, as I understand, are one of the most isolated professional sports teams, geographically, for their sport. As a result, they pull a fan base from a huge area:
The Seahawks are the only NFL franchise based in the Pacific Northwest region of North America, and thus attract support from a wide geographical area, including some parts of Oregon, Montana, Idaho, and Alaska, as well as Canadian fans in British Columbia and Alberta.
*Games are heard on 47 [radio] stations in five western states and Canada. *
The Seahawks may have had an advantage being that they did not move from some other part of the country, so have been growing their fan base steadily, but perhaps the Arizona teams wanted a faster way to appeal to that broad geographic fan base.
Yup. The Cardinals and Coyotes are both transplants, and even though they both represented as Phoenix at first, they both eventually started calling themselves the Arizona Cardinals and the Arizona Coyotes to represent the entire state. And the Diamondbacks, as an expansion team, wanted to generate excitement within the entire state that Arizona finally had a Major League Baseball franchise. It makes sense in a state with only one major league city. Not so much in a state like Ohio or Pennsylvania, or a state like California with many cities having a major league team.
Apparently Albuquerque fans can’t decide whether to root for Dallas or Denver.
Sure it does. The whole galaxy will be my marketing region.
I’ve always wondered why they aren’t the Toronto Maple Leaves.
mmm
Steven Pinker has a chapter about this (and the Minnesota Timberwolves*, etc.) in his book Words and Rules. It’s because when English nouns become part of a name, and the name is converted back into an ordinary noun, they lose their “head” (a lingustic term). Another example is “You’re all a bunch of Mickey Mouses!” (in the sense of “simpletons.”) Not “Mickey Mice.”
*an interesting exception to the rule
There’s some classic ones from Australia in the local leagues.
The Old Hobartians football team is nicknamed The Ships which is just…cool.
Parkes is a town that has a massive Radio Telescope. Their team is called the Spacemen, and the junior teams are Space Cadets.
Golden Point Rice-Eaters. The area had a lot of Chinese immigration during the 1800s gold rush, and so the football team was called this. Sadly extinct now.
Buchan is a tourist town, with the major attraction being a series of caves. Team name - Cavemen.
The Canberra University Netball Team had an unofficial nickname that you can probably work out for yourself.
And, the legendary - Grafton Corruption. (Grafton is a town in NSW).
Australian National University soccer/swimming?
I haven’t seen it yet in this thread, but Las Vegas has a AAA baseball team called the 51s after Groom Lake AFB’s infamous Area 51, located about 156 miles away.
One of the teams from South Africa which competes in the Super Rugby competition is the Cheetahs, which in non-US English pronunciation tends to sound the same as “cheaters.” Not a great association to have for a sporting team.
True, but I’m sure that all the closer major cities are currently disputing the name 
A few years ago, the city of Louisville was trying to lure an NBA franchise to town (the franchise eventually moved to Memphis instead), but the city included a few stipulations:
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the team would have to play in the arena that had just been built, which was to be called the Bucket (to fit in with the city’s claim of being the home of Kentucky Fried Chicken). When that failed, the arena was named the Yum Center (Yum being the corporation that owns KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut).
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the team would have to be renamed as The Colonels.
Unrelated, but the city has the AAA affiliate for the Cincinnati Reds. That team is known as the Louisville Bats. When they built the new park the play in, people wanted to rename the team the Louisville Sluggers. Hillerich & Bradsby, the people who make the Louisville Slugger baseball bats, wouldn’t allow it, though they did permit the stadium to be named Slugger Field.
So the team had a contest to rename them. The winning name was the RiverBats. Which has since been shortened to the Bats.
