In the PWHL’s initial season, all six of the original teams had to wait well over a year to embrace their identities, due to the league working extra hard to make sure each team had a name they could be proud of.
Also to trademark, but that doesn’t make for good storytelling to point out.
Mercifully, Seattle appears to have drawn that process to a close in less than a year.
Today, the PWHL announced that the Seattle PWHL team will henceforth be known as the Seattle Torrent, with a logo showing a whirling blue “S” with “TORRENT” across the middle of it.
My favorite part of these identity unveilings is the absurd graphic generated to try and justify the name, and Seattle Did Not Disappoint at all in that department:
While this has been a lovely roll out, with fans already lining up to get Torrent merch about an hour and a half before the store opens, the name *was* unfortunately spoiled by leakers who put the name and logo up on the internet a whole day or two early.
Those leakers? The Torrent themselves, on their store’s website.
Whoops.
As for the name; personally? I like it. Its perfectly suitable and its alliterative, which is always nice. It does however happen to share the name with the most popular concept in peer-to-peer file sharing, which is VERY funny if you’re a fan of such things, which i very much am.
Would you download a hockey team? Do we call fans “Seeders” and opposing team fans “Leechers”? I definitely get the feeling the rest of the league feels like they’re missing royalties because of the expansion draft.
But what about you? What do you think of this team’s new design and logo?