Eastern Finalists Revealed

Welcome to the IceHL blog. From now on, this is where you'll find everything related to our fantasy hockey league project, so keep checking back here for what's new.

As promised, it's time for the unveiling of the Top 3 finalist logos for each of the IceHL teams in the Eastern Conference. I'm not revealing the final ratings for any of the logos so as not to taint the voting results. Logos are displayed randomly.

Atlanta Arsenal
Joey Light	John Wriston	ogre39666
Baltimore Blue Crabs
John Wriston	Joey Light	Chris Smith
Boston Colonials
Eric Poole	Chris Smith	Shawn Steadman
Chicago Hitmen
Six Zero	Roccot	Craig C. Wheeler
Detroit Motorheads
tdog	Craig C. Wheeler	Chris Smith
Hamilton Steelcats
Chris Smith	Roccot	Sean Cox Tattoo
Milwaukee Lagers
Eddie Ray Design	JFred	Craig C. Wheeler
Minnesota Mammoths
LLP	Tone Loc Productions	Chris Smith
Montreal Olympiques
Craig C. Wheeler	Eddie Ray Design	Southpaw Design
North Carolina Nighthawks
Six Zero	Emilis Acus	Nick Matarese
New York Guardians
tdog	Craig C. Wheeler	Roccot
Quebec Armada
Chris Smith	Jason New Era Usher	Craig C. Wheeler
St. Louis Archers
Roccot	Craig C. Wheeler	Sigma Kappa
Tampa Bay Barracudas
Craig C. Wheeler	Six Zero	Chris Smith
Washington Sentinels
Six Zero (1)	tdog	Six Zero (2)

The Western Conference finalists will be revealed tomorrow and voting will then begin this weekend. By the end of August, we will have logos for all 30 IceHL teams. That's when the fun starts — jersey designs! Before I start taking submissions on those, we'll have a poll deciding whether third jerseys should be introduced alongside the home and road sweaters or if they will be created later and only for select teams.

After that, there are a lot of options. We can make the uniforms available to be used in video games such as NHL 09. We can expand the league and add new teams, as has been suggested. Some of you have even put forth the idea of creating the IceHL's development league.

All great ideas, but all for the distant future. As for what's next, voting kicks off Saturday. Team polls will be posted here in random order. When you vote, you will have the artist's complete branding package available to make your decision.

Notes: While voting is taking place during the next few weeks, I'll be setting up an image gallery where you can view all logos submissions created for this project that weren't selected as finalists. Also, please be aware that the Chris Smith who designed many logos for the IceHL project is NOT me. It's just a ubiquitous name we share.