How Well Does Anyone Know the Rules?

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Of course, if no one knows the rules, what are they arguing about?

From ESPN.com today we bring you a story that asks the question, “How well do we know baseball’s rules?”

One of the objections I hear most from my friends who are not sports fans is that the rules of sports seem to be completely arbitrary and incredibly fickle. Why so many whistles, they wonder? How can one not particularly violent act be a penalty while a figurative mugging goes unpunished? There are two sides to responding to this sentiment and we try to represent both of them on this site: the rules will seem less arbitrary the more you know about them; and of course they are arbitrary — let’s have some fun about it!

On the educational side, we’ve had posts explaining some basic concepts like What is a Down in Football, What is Being Offside in a number of sports, What Does it Mean to Have a Foul to Give, and How Do the Shooting Space and Checking Rules Work in Girls Lacrosse? We even addressed the issue directly when asked “Are Basketball Fouls Really Arbitrary? We’ve also had some fun with the issue. In the post about Girls Lacrosse we reminded you that:

even professional athletes are sometimes confused about the rules, like Donovan McNabb, a quarterback in the NFL who famously did not try very hard at the end of overtime because he thought that if the game was tied at the end of one overtime, they would just play another instead of the game ending in a tie… which it does.

This is exactly the conclusion the ESPN.com piece comes to: “We had 20 of the most astute players in the game take the quiz. Their average score: 5.5 out of 10.” The author Jayson Stark has some fun with the subject and collects a few gems about the rules of baseball:

Sam Fuld has to be one of the brightest human beings in baseball. He got better than 1400 on his SAT. He understands stuff like matrix methodology. But even he has a hard time understanding the rationale behind the rules of baseball. And can you blame him?

“Most of these rules are just illogical,” he said. “I tried to base my answers on logic and reason. … But baseball and logic don’t mix very well, in many respects.”

If you’d like to take the test yourself, here’s the link, post your results in the comments section!

Cue Cards 6-20-13

stk321064rknCue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Sport: Hockey
Teams: Chicago Blackhawks vs. Boston Bruins
When: Wednesday night, 6-19-13
Context: Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals. The Boston Bruins were leading the seven game series 2-1.
Result: Blackhawks win 6-5
Sports Fans will be Talking About:

  • Overtime. Oh my gosh so much overtime. Three of the four games in this series have gone to overtime
  • The high score! There had been 12 goals total in the three previous games. This game had 11 goals. Despite the Bruins losing, of the two goalies, Corey Crawford of the Blackhawks is the more concerning goalie. All five of the goals scored against him got past his glove hand. This is suggestive of a weakness the Bruins can continue to exploit.
  • How much confidence does this give the Blackhawks? Everything that had been going wrong for them in the series turned around in this game. Both their star players, Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews scored goals and they even got their first power play goal of the series (they hadn’t scored in nine attempts against the Bruins before this game)

What’s Next: Game 5 is Saturday night at 8 p.m.

How Does Overtime Work in Different Sports?

Dear Sports Fan,
How does overtime work in different sports? I’ve been watching more hockey this year and I know that overtime in the playoffs is different from overtime in the regular season. Are other sports like that too?
Thanks,
Sonja

Dear Sonja,

To quote the great Kanye West in honor of his latest album, “like old folks pissing, it all Depends.” Each sport has its own approach to how to proceed with competition if the score is tied after regulation time has expired. Like you say about hockey, even within each sport it can differ depending on whether the game takes place during the regular season or the playoffs. So while it may seem like I’m getting paid by the number of times I write “sometimes” in this post, that’s just the way overtime works.[1]
In general, extra time formats in sports (overtime)  fall into a few buckets:
  • Sudden Death: the most exciting two words in sports. This format is so dramatically named because the first team to allow their opponent to score loses the game immediately. This adds a heightened layer of tension that’s pretty much unparalleled. Sudden death doesn’t necessarily mean
    Sports: hockey, soccer (sometimes), football (sometimes), baseball (kind of), golf (sometimes).
  • Extra Period: This is essentially when an extra period of time is added and whoever is leading at the end of that extra period wins. It still involves added tension but doesn’t quite have the audience on a knife’s edge, since a single score doesn’t necessarily dictate the outcome.
    Sports: basketball (always), baseball (again kind of. In baseball they play a full inning, so essentially the team that has its turn to hit first in the inning is playing Extra Period but the team that hits second can be in a Sudden Death type situation.)
  • Shootouts: The ultimate Mano a Mano sports showdown. Each team picks its best payers (five in soccer, three in hockey) and each one gets a chance to score on the opposing team’s goalie. Some dismiss it as a gimmick but – for the viewer – there are few things more dramatic than seeing an athlete alone on the field or rink with the weight of the entire game on their shoulders. Of course if the shootout is tied after the allotted players have shot, you get a sudden death shootout, where the first player to miss costs his or her team the game.
    Sports: Hockey, soccer (in both cases this assumes you make it through the extra periods with neither team scoring and in the case of hockey that the game is during the regular season)
  • None: Although increasingly rare, there are some situations in sport where if a game is tied at the end of regular time the two teams shake hands, walk off the field, and neither team wins. It’s a tie! In the old days in soccer two teams that ended the game in a tie would go home, rest up, and play again in a few days in order to get a result.
You may have noticed that we haven’t covered football at all in this post. That’s because football is so absurdly complicated in its overtime rules that it is deserving of its own post. The college football rules are different than the professional ones… which differ from the regular season to the playoffs.
Thanks for your question and look out for a football overtime post soon,
Dean Russell Bell
Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Editor’s note. Mister Bell is not being paid at all for this post.↵

Cue Cards 6-19-13

stk321064rknCue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Sport: Basketball
Teams: Miami Heat vs. San Antonio Spurs
When: Tuesday night, 6-18-13
Context: Game 6 of the NBA Championships. The San Antonio Spurs were leading the seven game series 3-2.
Result: Heat win 103-100
Sports Fans will be Talking About:

  • Everything went right for the Spurs and they still lost. It was almost as if the Heat were playing one big unintentional rope-a-dope strategy. They took every punch the Spurs had for three quarters and came back roaring in the fourth. Will the older Spurs have anything left for game Seven? The overwhelming feeling will be that the Heat will win game seven at home to win the series on Thursday.
  • The refs. In the first three quarters when the Spurs were playing better, the refs were calling more fouls against the Heat. Then in the fourth quarter it switched around. Of course normally the team that is playing worse commits more fouls so that pattern is generally what you’d expect. Nonetheless people will find a way to be mysteriously indignant about this.
  • LeBron James was great in the fourth quarter and overtime. As the most physically talented player out there, the expectations for LeBron are enormous and he met them. This will be celebrated.

What’s Next: Game 7 is Thursday night at 9 p.m.

— — —

Sport: Soccer
Teams: United States vs. Honduras
When: Tuesday night, 6-18-13
Context: A 2014 World Cup Qualifying game.
Result: The United States wins 1-0.
Sports Fans will be Talking About:

  • Coach Jurgen Klinsmann. For some reason he seems to get all the credit for wins and blame for losses.
  • Jozy Altidore a US Striker (dude who is supposed to score goals) has now done just that in four straight games which is pretty impressive.
  • This win makes it almost definite that the United States will qualify for the 2014 World Cup. A few weeks ago that was absolutely not a sure thing.

What’s Next: The United States doesn’t have another qualifying match until September but play in the Gold Cup on Tuesday, July 9.

Cue Cards 6-18-13

stk321064rkn

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Sport: Hockey
Teams: Chicago Blackhawks vs. Boston Bruins
When: Monday night, 6-17-13
Context: Game 3 of the Stanley Cup Finals. The seven game series was tied 1-1.
Result: The Boston Bruins win 2-0.
Sports Fans will be Talking About:

  • The Boston Bruins goalie, Tuukka Rask, who hasn’t let in a goal since the first period of game 2.
  • Blackhawks player Marian Hossa who injured himself in the warm-ups and missed the game. Given what injuries players regularly play through, I wouldn’t be surprised to see him miss the rest of the series.
  • The series got a little rough in the third period once it was clear the Blackhawks were going to lose. How will that effect the next game?
  • Is a Bruins victory inevitable? It’s starting to feel that way after two straight victories, particularly because the Bruins have now won seven of the last eight games. Can the Blackhawks raise their game to match the level of their opponents?

What’s Next: Game 4 is Wednesday night at 8 p.m.

Cue Cards 6-17-13

stk321064rkn

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Sport: Hockey
Teams: Chicago Blackhawks vs. Boston Bruins
When: Saturday night, 6-15-13
Context: Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Finals. Chicago won game 1 in triple over-time and had the 1-0 series lead.
Result: The Boston Bruins win 2-1 in overtime.
Sports Fans will be Talking About:

  • The Boston Bruins goalie, Tuukka Rask, played superbly in the first period to keep the Bruins in the game.
  • This was the second game in a seven game series and both games have gone to overtime. In two games the teams have played the equivalent of three games because of all the overtime needed.
  • In a seven game series, the team with the better regular season record gets four of the seven games at home. Chicago was at home for the first two games and with the series tied at 1-1, the Bruins now have three of the remaining five games at home. They have captured the home ice advantage.

What’s Next: Game 3 is Monday night at 8 p.m.

— — —

Sport: Basketball
Teams: Miami Heat vs. San Antonio Spurs
When: Sunday night, 6-16-13
Context: Game 5 of the NBA Championships. The seven game series is tied at two games apiece.
Result: Spurs win 114-104
Sports Fans will be Talking About:

  • What’s wrong with the Miami Heat. The Heat were favorites because of their “big three” star players Lebron James, Dwayne Wade, and Chris Bosh. Now they are one more loss away from losing the championship.
  • Alternating blow-outs. After a close game one, the teams have traded off winning games by at least ten points.
  • Spur Danny Green who was a highly regarded player in college but before this season a complete flop as a professional has been playing incredibly well. He had 24 points in the game and now has the record for most three-pointers made in the NBA finals in history.
  • Continuity (the Spurs best players and coach have been playing together for more than a decade) and coaching have the Spurs one victory away from winning the championship.

What’s Next: Game 6 is Tuesday night at 9 p.m.

— — —

Sport: Golf
Tournament: U.S. Open
When: Thursday-Sunday,June 13-16
Context: Second of four major golf championships of the year – the four most high profile, prestigious tournaments in golf
Result: England’s Justin Rose won with a score of 1 over par – kind of like being valedictorian with a GPA of 2.5
Sports Fans will be Talking About:
  • The course won. It’s rare when you gather the best players in golf and none of them break par cumulatively over four rounds – but that’s what happened at this and last year’s U.S. Open. Both Opens were won by a player who shot one stroke over par, a pretty mediocre score for professional golfers and an indication of the traditional difficulty of the U.S. Open courses.
  • Tiger comes up short in another major. Tiger Woods is the best golfer of his generation but to be the best golfer of all time he has to break Jack Nicklaus’s record of 18 majors won – he’s currently 4 behind and hasn’t won one since he was caught setting the record for most females slept with by a golfer in the history of one of the world’s most ancient sports.
  • Lefty comes up short again. Phil Mickelson (aka Lefty cause…uh…he’s left-handed) is perhaps the second most well-known American golfer active today. Unlike Tiger he’s best known for his tragic shortcomings in big tournaments, which include 5 previous runner-up finishes at the U.S. Open, several of which occurred in heartbreaking fashion. True to form he started the day leading the tournament but wasn’t able to close and lost by 2 strokes.
What’s Next: The next major golf tournament is the Open Championships, which are played in the UK – this year it will be hosted at Muirfield, in Scotland, July 18-21.

Why Does Vladimir Putin Have a Super Bowl Ring?

From the how-weird-can-it-get files, this story is about whether or not the Russian politician Vladimir Putin stole an NFL Championship ring from the owner of the New England Patriots, Robert Kraft.

The story begins in the summer of 2005 when Robert Kraft went on a trip to Russia. The New England Patriots, then (as now) one of the best teams in the National Football League, had just won their third Super Bowl in four years. Vladimir Putin’s record was almost as good as Kraft’s. Elected in 2000 after his predecessor Boris Yeltsin resigned unexpectedly, Putin had just been reelected in 2004 with 71% of the vote. At the end of a day of meetings between Putin, Kraft, and other American businessmen, something happened and Putin ended up with Kraft’s Super Bowl ring.

What’s in a ring? Most team sports leagues, including the NFL, give out a trophy to the championship team. There is also a tradition that the winning organization rewards its own players and coaches with gaudy championship rings as a celebration of the winning season. These rings have become a sort of jockish short-hand representing the championships themselves. One common factor in arguments about how to rate a player is “how many rings does he or she have?” Athletes use the word like this too, as in the famous rejoinder, ““I can’t hear what Jeremy says, because I’ve got my two Stanley Cup rings plugging my ears” by hockey goalie Patrick Roy when taunted by Jeremy Roenick, a good player but one who had never won championships like Roy had.

The exact series of events that led to Putin possessing Kraft’s ring was never completely clear, even in 2005. In the Boston Globe article Donovan Slack wrote that it could be “an international incident of sorts, a misunderstanding of Super Bowl proportions. Or it could be a very, very generous gift.” Despite Kraft’s statement a few days later that he, “decided to give him the ring as a symbol of the respect and admiration that I have for the Russian people and the leadership of President Putin.” there was always a certain mystery around the incident.

In a wonderful profile of Kraft’s wife Myra in 2007, the New York Times reported her version of the story which involved an off-color remark by Putin that he could “kill someone” with the ring before more or less walking off with it, to her husband’s dismay. The story of the ring being a gift was a cover-up to avoid an international incident, she said.

The story resurfaced this week when Robert Kraft finally confirmed his now deceased wife’s version of the story, even adding some henchmen into the mix: “I put my hand out and he put it in his pocket, and three KGB guys got around him and walked out.”

Just to make things even more scandalous, Putin responded to the story today through spokesperson and witness Dmitry Peskov, who said that “what Mr. Kraft is saying now is weird.” As reported by CNN, the metric system-obsessed spokesman remembered that he “was standing 20 centimeters away from him and Mr. Putin and saw and heard how Mr. Kraft gave this ring as a gift.”

What will happen next? Who knows! But it’s truly a great world that creates the headline “Putin denies stealing Kraft’s Super Bowl ring” and puts it on the front page of ESPN.

What are the Positions in Basketball?

Dear Sports Fan,

What are the positions in basketball? I’m watching the Spurs and the Heat in the finals tonight and they mentioned that Lebron can guard any position. I’m more of a football fan and so while I’m sure there are positions in basketball, it all looks pretty fluid and interchangeable to me.

Thanks,
Geneva

Dear Geneva,

There are positions in basketball although like you pointed out, they are more fluid than football positions. In a traditional lineup, each of the five players on the court has their own positional label that corresponds to a general set of skills and a set of responsibilities. Basketball is also in the midst of a shift in the language people use to describe the positions. The older way of referring to positions is by name: Point Guard, Shooting Guard, Small Forward, Power Forward, and Center. The new form is just the numbers from one through five. This shift, aside from making things a little more confusing, matches a general shift in the way basketball is played. We’ll start by describing the positions from Point Guard or One to Center or Five and then talk about the general shift in the game. I’m going to describe these positions for men’s basketball but they hold pretty much just the same for women.

Point Guard or One:

The point guard is generally the smallest, quickest guy on the team. Their responsibility is to take the ball down the court and then pass it to their teammates. The point guard will often be the one to call the play the team runs (yes, there are plays like in football but they are generally more flexible) and responsible for clever improvisation when the play doesn’t work quite as it was diagrammed. The point guard is usually not the best scorer on the team and there is a general ethos of the position that says it is the point guard’s job, even if they might be able to score, to defer to their teammates. The point guard is a facilitator.

Jason Kidd who just retired and Tony Parker are great examples of players who epitomize the point guard position.

Shooting Guard or Two:

The shooting guard is quite the opposite of the point guard. Roughly the same size as the point guard, the shooting guard distinguishes themselves by… you guessed it… shooting the ball! You won’t see them passing up a chance to shoot for a teammate, these guys know what their job on the court is and they are good at it. You’ll usually see shooting guards running around like crazy, using their teammates as obstacles to give them just enough space apart from the person guarding them so that they can get a pass and shoot before the defender catches up. They are often good at shooting three pointers (from behind the colored arc around the basket) and love to lurk in the corner waiting for a pass.

Reggie Miller and Ray Allen are pure examples of the shooting guard position. Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan are great players who played shooting guard with a style more normally associated with small forwards.

Small Forward or Three:

The small forward is the most acrobatic of the players on the court. Right in the middle in terms of height, these players use their athleticism to score however they possibly can. Their combination of speed, power, and skill allows them the versatility to shoot over their defender or run right by him to get to the basket for a lay-up or a dunk. As small forwards get older and start to lose their raw athletic superiority, they generally shift towards becoming more of a shooting specialist or, if they have the size for it, more like the players in our next position.

Paul Pierce and Joe Johnson are great examples of Small Forwards. Lebron James plays the 3 more often than any other position (he can really play all five) but he is such a unique athlete that he’s probably not a very useful example to study.

Power Forward or Four:

The power forward is traditionally an enormous muscly dude. The scariest person on the court, the power forward is capable of throwing down enormously intimidating dunks but is more likely to specialize in setting mean picks for their smaller teammates and rebounding like crazy after a missed shot. In recent years the trend for power forwards has been to include someone who has the skill and predilection for scoring more traditionally found in a small forward or shooting guard but the height traditionally associated with a power forward.

Karl Malone and Tim Duncan are classic power forwards. Dirk Nowitzki is perhaps the best example of the non-traditional or “stretch” four.

Center or Five:

The center is the tallest guy on the court. There’s a saying in basketball that you “can’t teach height.” What this means is that no matter how skilled a smaller player is, a tall player will always have some advantages over them. As a result, there are a surprising number of centers, even in the NBA, who actually aren’t that good at or interested in basketball. They just happened to be the kind of seven-foot people who aren’t able to resist millions of dollars and a celebrity life. The center has undergone a similar trend to the one in power forwards in the past fifteen years but traditionally sets up on offense and defense as the closest person to the basket. On offense they catch the ball with their back to the basket and use their size to bump their defender until they can turn around and place the ball in the basket.

In terms of epitomizing what a center is like, there’s no one better to look to than Shaquille O’Neil although Bill Walton is another great player synonymous with the center position.

Evolution in Style

Over the past fifteen years, I’ve noticed people referring to the positions more and more by number instead of name. I think that this has come with the change in how the bigger positions are played. As mentioned in the description of power forwards and centers, a lot of recent players have the size traditionally associated with these positions but the skill and inclination to play the game more like a shooting guard or a small forward. As the more descriptive terms became less accurate (power forwards that aren’t exactly powerful… centers that play a whole lot at the edges of the court…) it became more popular to use the numbers from one to five to refer to players.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

What is "Having the Last Change" in Hockey?

Dear Sports Fan,

What does “having the last change” in hockey mean? Please tell me it has something to do with uniform color…

Thanks,
Bob

Dear Bob,

Hockey is one of a few sports that actually bakes into the rule book a couple of small advantages for the home team. Having the last change is one of those advantages and it means that the home team has more control over who on their team plays against particular players on the other team. Here’s how and when this happens and also a little bit of how a team might use this to its advantage.

Hockey is a completely exhausting game (this is one reason why it’s so exciting, as covered in our earlier post on why people like hockey) and the players can only play for about 45 seconds at a time. Hockey teams are therefore made up of about three to four times the number of players as can be on the ice at any time. Unlike football, there isn’t a break between plays, so when players have hit the end of their 45 second shift they skate to their bench and return to it to catch their breath while another player on their team launches themselves onto the ice to replace them. This process looks incredibly chaotic but is normally pretty controlled (and when it’s not, the team that has messed up their substitution often puts themselves at risk for having a goal scored on them). Periodically there will be a break in the play, usually because either the puck has been shot out of the rink, a goalie covers up the puck, a goal is scored, or a penalty is called. When this happens, both coaches have the opportunity to reflect for a second or two and then choose which players they want on the ice.

Coaches will do anything do gain an advantage, and as we will explain later, you can definitely get an advantage through clever player substitutions. As you would imagine, with no rule in place to legislate such things, both coaches would try to see who the other coach is going to put on the ice and then decide who they choose for their team. As exciting as this would be to watch, the NHL decided to control things with a rule that states:

82.1 Line Change – Following the stoppage of play, the visiting team shall promptly place a line-up on the ice ready for play and no substitution shall be made from that time until play has been resumed. The home team may then make any desired substitution, except in cases following an icing, which does not result in the delay of the game.

The home team will use this rule to their advantage by watching to see when the visiting team puts their best offensive players on the ice and then countering with either their best pair of defensive defense-men or their best unit of defensive “checking” forwards. Conversely some home teams will wait to see when their opponents put their best defensive players on the ice and then scuttle their offensive stars back onto the bench to patiently wait for the visiting team’s players to get tired. Of course a lot of the time a visiting coach will have a pretty good idea who the home coach wants to get on the ice. A lot of it is situational — for instance, if a team is down by a few goals and the puck is going to be dropped near their opponent’s goal, they are definitely going to want some of their better offensive players on the ice. So a visiting coach is pretty safe in putting his best defensive players on the ice — I mean what is the home team going to do? If a match-up is really important to a coach he may be willing to instruct his players to play just until their team gets the puck and then to quickly skate off to be replaced. THEN the other coach might tell his players to do the same. It all has the effect of turning a graceful hockey game into something that looks like this.

If this all sounds a little cowardly or over-complicated to you, you might be right. Home teams in the NHL do win more than away teams (55.7% of the time) but that’s actually not that much compared to the advantage of home teams in other sports like the NBA (60.5%) or even the NFL (57.3%) and neither of those sports have any rules that make life easier for the home team. I’m not sure why that is. Maybe some of the advantages that a home team gets are counter-acted by the simplicity of being the away team and knowing that they cannot dictate who plays against who. There are so many factors that go into the advantage a home team has (emotion, routine, intimidated refs, etc.) that it would be pretty hard to isolate this one… but I’m sure there’s a statistician out there working on it!

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

Why are Sports Teams Changing Names?

Dear Sports Fan,

I read an article the other day that said the Charlotte Bobcats was changing their name to the Charlotte Hornets. What’s up with that? Why are they changing their name?

Thanks,
Tommy

Dear Tommy,

It’s true, the Charlotte area professional basketball team is changing their name from the Bobcats to the Hornets. They are doing this in part because the name, which has a history in the Charlotte area dating back to the Revolutionary War, has recently become available, but it’s also because they haven’t built a very reputable brand for themselves as the Bobcats.

In 1985 the National Basketball Association decided to add four new teams to its league. Charlotte eventually became the home to one of those four teams and in the fall of 1988 the team started its first season as the Hornets. They played there for fourteen years until 2002 when following what sounds like some really ugly politics between the city of Charlotte and the unsavory owner of the Hornets, the team moved to New Orleans. In one of the great “it’s not you, it’s me… or in this case your horrible owner,” the NBA immediately said that they would locate one of their next expansion teams in Charlotte. This team started in 2004 and became the Charlotte Bobcats. The original team kept its name and its colors when it moved to New Orleans and has played as the New Orleans Hornets for the last five years. This year, the team officially announced that they were going to change their name to the New Orleans Pelicans! (Pelicans have become a symbol of the city since the oil spill in 2010.) This change, of course, meant that the Hornets name was available again and after weeks of rumor, the Charlotte team officially petitioned the league for the name back.

Both of the teams have not won very much in their recent history. The Bobcats (soon to be the Hornets again) have only ever had one season when they won more games than they lost. This was also the one year that they made the playoffs but they did not win a single playoff game. Ouch. The Pelicans (recently the Hornets) have done a little better since moving to New Orleans than their replacement in Charlotte but not by much. They have made the playoffs five times and even won a playoff series once, in 2007-2008. In the past two years though they have won fewer than 30 games out of 82 each season. Both teams are looking to re-brand their team and what better way to do it than with a new name and colors? In Charlotte, the team will be trying to “galvanize our fan base by unifying our loyal Bobcats fans with those who have strong memories of our city’s NBA predecessor.” In New Orleans, the team is “excited to start a new era in Louisiana basketball history.”

One wonders what would happen if all the NBA teams that have moved had done this. Maybe the team in New Orleans would be happy with its old name, the Jazz that now belongs to the team in Utah. The LA Lakers would have to send their name back to Minnesota (the land of ten thousand lakes) who I’m guessing would be happy to shed the name Timberwolves. Philadelphia would be able to choose between their current name, the 76ers or their original name, the Warriors, now used by the team in “Golden State” or Northern California. Memphis would probably be happy to stop confusing people by having a team called the Grizzlies which was originally located in Vancouver.

So where does that leave us? If you ask some animal experts, like this New Orleans radio station did, everything is okay — both animals are well equipped to inspire basketball teams:

Atherton pointed out the pelican’s ability to ward off enemies and intimidate rivals with its sharp beak tooth and aggressive wing flapping. Lemann made a case for the hornet as an excellent mascot, for its fierce, stinging defensive reputation.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer