Much to my chagrin, the NBA's liberal approach to team nickname alterations will leave many basketball fans utterly confused.
Analysts still regularly forget that the New Jersey Nets moved across the river to Brooklyn. Next year, the Sacramento Kings will become the Seattle SuperSonics, while the records and banners from the forty year history of the Sonics in Seattle who played there from 1967 to 2008, will likely remain with the Oklahoma City Thunder. Analogously, the revived SuperSonics will be entitled to the storied history of the Sacramento Kings, which started as the Rochester Royals in 1945, the NBA's inaugural season. But these archival issues stem from concrete matters substantive changes in ownership and city location for which there are real consequences.
Garnering as much attention as these examples is the equally interesting but decidedly trivial matter of a professional basketball team changing its nickname and keeping all else equal. While a team's mascot is an undoubtedly superficial representation of the franchise, rejecting the history associated with that nickname can be a powerful statement.
Yesterday, the New Orleans Hornets' owner Tom Benson formally announced his intention to rebrand his NBA franchise as the Pelicans. Benson, also the longtime owner of the New Orleans Saints, purchased the Hornets last season after a turbulent few years that paralleled the tumult in its home city. A regular Western Conference bottom-dweller, the franchise faced a foe that no scouting report could have foreseen in Hurricane Katrina. The team's finances following the hurricane were unsustainable, and it was sold to the NBA. The NBA commissioner did not want the team to leave New Orleans, making Benson's offer to buy the team extremely attractive. New Orleans has always been a Saints town, and Benson's bid was greeted with cheers across Louisiana and the basketball community.
As a New Orleans native, Benson believed that a revival of the franchise would demand connecting it to the Bayou, to assert the resilience of a demoralized city. Benson's decision or, more accurately, his wife's decision to move forward as the Pelicans the Louisiana state bird sends a message to the people of New Orleans that this franchise isn't going anywhere. Benson is aware of the transformative effects a sports team can have on a city, particularly a passionate one like New Orleans, as he experienced after the Saints emerged victorious from the Super Bowl in 2009.
Like I said, changing a nickname or a mascot on its own will rarely yield any substantive transformation, either on the court or more broadly in a team's territory. What it can do is associate itself with an indigenous movement one that already has a narrative but lacks for symbols. This is the potential for the Pelicans, to represent the continued triumphs of New Orleans in the face of overwhelming adversity.
The 1974 decision by Dartmouth's Board of Trustees to permanently retire the nickname "Indians" in favor of the "Big Green" follows a similar decision-calculus to the one Benson used in renaming the New Orleans basketball team. As social change rocked the very fabric of the United States, Dartmouth's seclusion was by no means insulation from the popular upheaval, particularly because students were one of the driving forces behind the progressive changes across America at the time. With the height of the civil rights movement directly in the rearview mirror and the palpable disillusionment with the Vietnam War, then-President John Kemeny made it his mission to not only refocus a boisterous student body, but also to cede ground to the inevitable march of progress. Just two years before Kemeny officially purged the Indian mascot from the athletic department, Kemeny led Dartmouth's transition from a school for men to a modern coeducational institution.
Dartmouth would not be left behind as the world changed around it. Just as the deeper story of New Orleans' contemporary struggles is reflected in the Hornets becoming the Pelicans, so too was Dartmouth's struggle to balance tradition and progress reflected in the decision to scrap the Indian as a mascot.
