Seattle NHL team to reveal nickname on Thursday, per report

Seattle’s NHL franchise will finally announce a team name, according to a report from The Seattle Times. The name will be announced through a conference scheduled for Thursday morning. There has been no indication on what kind of name the team will settle on before officially becoming the 32nd franchise of the NHL

CEO Tod Leiweke originally told The Seattle Times back in June that this decision wouldn’t be made until the fall, citing multiple reasons for this delayed decision, which ranged from trademark issues to wanting to avoid looking “tone deaf” in the face of continuing protests against racial injustice and police brutality throughout the country.

While a report from the Seattle Times saw the name “Sockeyes” beat out Totems, Metropolitans, Steelheads and Kraken in a poll of over 140,000 votes, trademarking issues delayed a focus on just one single idea.

“If you do just one [name], then you’ve left yourself hostage to any sort of challenge,” Leiweke told the Seattle Times. “So we’ve had to do multiple [trade]marks, and that’s about where we are.”

He also added that every name that fans have suggested over the past two years, which the CEO says has numbered in the thousands, had some sort of trademark issue that needed working through.