From The Ground Up: Pacific Names

The five markets with the most votes, to be included in the Pacific Division of our fantasy hockey league are final. Over 11,000 individual votes were cast in the poll.

In this post, I'm outlining those markets (alphabetically) along with the acceptable locators (listed below) for your team name nominations — which I'll begin accepting today by comment only.

• ANCHORAGE, Alaska
  Alaska | Anchorage


• LOS ANGELES, California
  California | Los Angeles | Anaheim | Long Beach


• PORTLAND, Oregon
  Oregon | Portland | Salem


• SEATTLE, Washington
  Washington | Seattle | Tacoma | Olympia


• VANCOUVER, British Columbia
  B.C. | Vancouver | Burnaby | Victoria

DO NOT SUBMIT NAME NOMINATIONS VIA EMAIL. THEY WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED.

Submit your team name nominations by leaving a comment below. Email submissions will be discarded. I will accept nominations for one week at which point new comments on this post will be closed. All name submissions that fit within the following parameters will be included in the name selection process which will begin next weekend.

If you want your submission included, DO NOT:
• use the name of any current or past NHL or WHA team.
• use the name of any current AHL or ECHL team.
• use the name or close variation of any current or past professional sports team within the same market or geographical area.
• use the name of any team from Project: IHA.
• use any name that would be considered vulgar, obscene or in any way inappropriate. (Sorry, this is my call.)

If you decide to use a locator not already on the list above, be prepared to have it discarded. I'm not setting that in stone as a restriction, but I'm also not guaranteeing I'll include anything not on the list. Sorry for all the restrictions but sometimes you have to "guide" originality.

Late addition: I'll also probably be weaning out some of the more ridiculous and absurd names. I don't mind fun ones, but I think you guys know what I mean.

It was suggested by a reader (ogre39666) that when submitting names you also submit a short reasoning for that name. I won't require that but I will recommend it since it might help your submission get votes later on if folks know where you got your idea.

Don't forget to make your submissions for the Central Division. You have until September 13.

Start submitting!

Housekeeping

I wanted to briefly mention a few things this morning. Nothing big. First, you can consider my "break" over. It's not like I ever really took one anyway but I just finished up a big project I was working on — what a relief. Anyway, all that means is I'm going to try and get back to doing more concept posts on a regular basis. News and project coverage will remain the same.

I'm ending a short-lived series. Wallpaper Wednesday is now over. I wasn't getting the sort of submissions I was hoping for. More than anything, this is a hockey logo/jersey blog. Instead of getting wallpaper designs that did cool things with logos and sweaters, I was getting wallpapers with random pictures of players. Don't get me wrong, I thought a lot of them were well done but just not in the spirit of Icethetics.

Freak Out Friday will continue. In fact, I'll have a new one posted late tonight next week. Need more submissions!

You guys can stop emailing me asking about Matt's rebranding of the St. Louis Blues. He should have it ready soon. I'll post it when he sends and he'll send it when he's finished. This is his hobby which comes after life/school/job. He does great work because he doesn't rush through it.

On now to comments. I haven't really had a whole lot of issues with them lately but I still wanted to go over some rules which I don't think I've ever really gone into before. I try to avoid deleting comments, but there are a few occasions where I will. Vulgarity — even with * in it. Attacking another person. Being mean or needlessly rude (think of what your mother taught you). Posting a link to your own website or one irrelevant to the topic being discussed. Posting an email address. Just a few things.

I mean there are a few other things but I figure if I mention those it should at least cut down on what I have to delete. Because worst case scenario is that I start moderating all comments. That's just no fun for me or anybody else. I like keeping this open so everybody can express their opinion. But keep it clean and nice. What possible reason could there be not to?

That's all. Any questions? Feel free to ask.

Center Ice Champion

Congrats to the Penguins!
With 58% of the nearly 4,000 votes, the center ice design of the Pittsburgh Penguins has been declared the best in the NHL. My thanks to all who voted and all the folks who linked people here! The visitor count for the blog skyrocketed this last week for this final poll.

I'm working on championship banner ideas. I think I'll include all the logo champions from both NHLToL and ToHL in the new banners. Hope to have them posted at the bottom of the pollbar in the next few weeks.

I'm also thinking about the next logo tournament. I'm considering an IHA Tournament of Logos. Maybe a Rbk EDGE jersey tournament. Third jerseys for sure once they've all been unveiled officially. If you've got any other ideas, let me know by email or comment.

No IHA Polls This Week

Since the Central Division was just posted last week, you still have one more week to submit your logo designs. That means there will be no polls posted for the IHA this week.

Instead, I'll use this week to get everyone caught up on the logo winners. Technically you've already seen the winners for the Atlantic Division, but you're getting them again today just for the sake of simplicity. Tomorrow you'll get the West. Wednesday will be the Northeast. Thursday the Pacific. And on Friday you'll see who won in the Great Lakes.

I'm doing it this way because unfortunately, once a poll closes the images associated with it seem to disappear into cyberspace.

From The Ground Up: Picking Cities

This past week you all have been voting on the divisional boundary alignment for the Icethetics-created fantasy hockey league. Alignment A got the most votes, taking 733 of 2,208. For a quick refresher, here's what that boundary alignment looks like.

Obviously, not all of the cities listed will be included. Last week we completed a poll in which you guys determined our league would have 30 teams. That brings us to this week. We're going to be doing two divisions at a time over the next three weeks.

This week you'll vote on the cities to be included in the Pacific and Central Divisions. One from the West, one from the East. Five cities from each division — 10 total. Yay, math.

From the 12 cities listed, you can choose to vote for as few as 1 or as many as all 12. It's entirely up to you. You just choose the cities you think should be included. However, only the five with the most votes at the end of the week will be included in the division.

LOOKING AHEAD
For reference, next week will be the North and Northeast Divisions. That'll be the weekend of September 6. After that we'll do the South and Southeast. Those polls will begin on the weekend of September 13.

My plan is to do a few things concurrently just to get through this quicker, but I reserve the right to change my mind if it becomes too much work for me. Next weekend we'll know which cities are getting teams so at that point I'd like to start taking nominations for team names.

NAMING NOMINATIONS
IMPORTANT: I will not accept name nominations until the city selection polls are finalized — no matter how many votes any city is getting!

Now, about how the naming will work. When you make a nomination, you must include locator with it. In other words, don't just submit Lightning. Submit Tampa Bay Lightning. Or Florida Lightning or St. Petersburg Lightning. Like I said before, you'll be choosing a locator that goes with your name.

When these polls are finished, I will offer a complete list of acceptable locators for each city chosen. For example, if Tampa was one of the selected cities, your locator options would be: Tampa, Tampa Bay, Florida, St. Petersburg, Clearwater, and Lakeland. Orlando would not be accepted because it is considered a separate market for our purposes. However, if Orlando was selected instead of Tampa, Lakeland might still be included with it because of its proximity to both cities. But if Tampa and Orlando were both selected, Lakeland would only be available to one city or the other. Make sense?

We'll do the same name nominating process the week after for the next two divisions and so on. I'll accept nominations for a week and then have you guys vote on the final name. All nominations will be included in this process provided they fit within the guidelines I set up. More on those in the next paragraph.

THE RESTRICTIONS
I know saying restrictions sounds bad but it's basically what they are. I'm just starting to work on this so don't consider this final by any means. It's just a way of letting you know what to expect. A team name nomination will NOT be accepted if it breaks any of the following rules:

• It may not use a name of any current or past NHL team.


• It may not use the name of any current AHL or ECHL team.


• It may not use the name or close variation of any professional sports team currently or previously within the same market or geographical area.


• It may not use the name of any team from Project: IHA


• It may not be vulgar or in any way inappropriate. (And I'll decide what's inappropriate.)

That should cut down on any potential similarity to the NHL or any other league. I'll have another list like this for when it comes time to choose colors and create logos. But again, this is not final. If you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them. Email me or leave a comment.

Happy voting!

Center Ice Championship

The final poll for the Center Ice Tournament has been posted in the pollbar. It's the Oilers and Penguins in the final round but don't discount the Bruins and Sharks. Both polls in the last round were extremely close. It'll be interesting to see who pulls out the win in the end.

Enlarge: Penguins | Sharks

Enlarge: Bruins | Oilers

The poll will be open until Wednesday. Happy voting!

Sanford Picks Mask Finalists

A few weeks ago the Vancouver Canucks held a competition on behalf of Curtis Sanford to design his new mask. They received over 300 designs from fans and artists and now the finalists have been posted on their official web site.

You can see galleries of Sanford's Top 10 favorites and the staff's Top 40. Some of them are amazingly well done. Others not so much. Go see for yourself.

Poll Problems

Quick note. I've been looking into a problem with the polls. Apparently folks using Internet Explorer are not seeing the formatting of the polls on the blog properly. This includes colors, sizing, layout and most notably, the all-important vote button. I'm looking into a solution for this.

As a temporary fix, you can still vote by making a selection like normal and then clicking the grey box next to the View Results link. Not all of the polls in the pollbar are being affected. It's a weird problem. I'm working on it.

UPDATE (12:27 PM): Polls are back to normal now. The problem was the section with the results from previous pollls. I thought it'd be nice feature to have but I guess it was adversely affecting IE. So it's gone now. Anyway, problem solved. (But now the star ratings for each post seem to be gone. Working on it.)

From The Ground Up: Divisions

Check the pollbar. You can now vote on your preferred divisional boundary alignment for the Icethetics fantasy league.

Since I can't offer higher resolution images within the poll, I'm offering them here with a list of cities available to each division. All divisions here are named by geography.

Here are some things to think about with regard to the divisional boundaries. The larger the division area, the fewer teams you get out of that area in a way. Remember, every division gets 5 teams. Smaller divisional areas have a better chance of getting a city you want, for example.

So, if you think there should be more Canadian teams and fewer southern teams, you'll probably want to pick D. If you want more eastern cities than western, go with C. A has the best geographical spread. B and E rely heavily on northern cities. Just a few observations. There are plenty of other ways to look at each setup.

Happy voting!

From The Ground Up, Part 3

Part 1 · Part 2

Today voting ended on the poll about how many teams our little fantasy league will have. Much to my disappointment, you all chose 30 — same as the NHL and same as the IHA. I know I run the risk of alienating readers by calling 34% of you a disappointment, but that's something I'm just going to have to live with. (Unless someone can give me a really good reason why we should be unoriginal and then I'll eat my words.)

I'll tell you I almost didn't include it because I wanted to stay off the beaten path. I used it more or less as a test to see how much you guys were willing to stray from what you know and move into new territory. Comfortable is comfortable but let's not make a habit out of recreating the NHL here. That's not the point, remember?

I've been reading the comments in the last two posts. A lot of you seem to like the idea of doing a league with all non-NHL cities (with an Original Six exemption, oddly enough). That's not a terrible idea considering what we've witnessed in the last two polls. But to do that would be an executive decision by me. Instead, here's the plan.

THE PLAN
Instead of creating a giant list of cities and allowing you guys to pick your favorites, I have a better idea. First, you're going to choose the geographical boundaries for the divisions.

I've created five maps for you to choose from. I think they're each different and good in their own way. None of them are even close to being in line with the NHL's current divisional map. You guys can study them and pick your favorite. Once we have the divisional boundaries decided, everything we vote on will be done division by division. Makes less work for me.

At some point tomorrow the new poll will appear in the sidebar with the five choices.

The next step will be selecting the markets that will have teams. I say markets (or metropolitan areas) for a couple of reasons: 1) I'd like to avoid multiple teams from the same market like New York or L.A. (I know it's one decision I'm taking away from you. Sorry. Let's make this easy.); and 2) if, for example, a city like San Francisco is chosen, I want there to be the option of placing the team in San Jose or Oakland or something.

I'll pick 12 cities from each divisional area (based on market size, most likely) and the 5 with the most votes will be awarded franchises. Simple as that. If you don't think this is the good plan, present a better one to me either by email or as a comment.

THE FUTURE
I've also been planning into the future of this league and while I won't go into detail right now, I will offer a few tidbits. Once we have all the cities picked out for each division, we'll move on to naming the teams, one division at a time. We'll take nominations and every entry that meets the guidelines will be included in the voting. More details on that later.

To keep the rest of the process from becoming excruciatingly tedious, we won't be voting on things like logos and colors separately. Once all the teams have been named, I'll begin taking logo submissions. That means you pick the color scheme to go with your logo set. The team's colors will be determined by the winning logo. All entries that meet the guidelines will be included in the voting. More details on that later.

All of the accepted entries will appear on one page and you'll rate each logo from 1 to 5 stars. The logo with the highest rating wins. In the event of a tie, we'll hold a run-off poll. After we have logos, we'll do jerseys. After that who knows. But all that will probably take us several months anyway.

THE NAME
By the way, this league is going to need a name. Start making suggestions. The only criteria I have is that it must use the name Icethetics in it and it cannot have the acronym IHA or NIHL. Let's hear some creative ideas.

For what it's worth, I like the idea of the guy who said we should pretend we're creating a new league in a world 20 years after the collapse of the NHL. Let's say some Bettman-like character holds the trademarks to every team name and logo from the NHL and he's vindictive. You steal one of his logos or team names — even a little bit — and he'll eat your children. You don't want your children eaten do you?

Let's try to be original and, mostly, have fun!