Pretty Underwhelming Monsters

Tonight, there was a major announcement as one professional hockey franchise got themselves into the game in a big way. As you may know, the ECHL approved the Tahoe Knight Monsters to join the league for the 2024-25 season, and the Knight Monsters have been working diligently to get themselves ready. They have a coach, they've signed a few players, and they have a logo, but there were still some key pieces missing that would help them be successful in their inaugural season. Tonight, they crossed a few of those missing pieces off the list with an event at Bally's Lake Tahoe.

One of those big pieces was their affiliation announcement, and the Knight Monsters surprised no one as they announced that they will be ECHL affiliate of the NHL's Vegas Golden Knights and the AHL's Henderson Silver Knights. This should have surprised absolutely no one after the Savannah Ghost Pirates changed their affiliation from Vegas-Henderson to Florida-Charlotte earlier this month, so the dots were pretty easy to connect. Nevertheless, the Vegas prospects will be less than 500 miles away at both the AHL and ECHL levels now, so the Golden Knights are setup pretty well in the southwest USA.

The second announcement at tonight's event was the unveiling of the mascot for the Knight Monsters. As seen to the right, "Tessie" is the cartoon monster wearing the knight helmet, and Tessie will be roaming the stands in Lake Tahoe next season. If you know my thoughts on mascots, I believe they should be somewhat cartoonish because mascots are for the kids and should be easily identifiable, and Tessie hits the mark on both of those mascot criteria. Overall, I don't have a problem with how Tessie looks and, excuse my choice of pronouns since it wasn't clear, he should help market the team in the region. Chalk this one up as a win!

It's when we get to what they're wearing that things fall short. The Knight Monsters are a team built on fantasy and the whimsical since there's never been a "knight monster" in the history of the world, so you'd hope they'd take a little creative control of their look by having a little fun with the knight and monster imagery.

Instead, here's what they produced for their inaugural season.

This might be one of the more boring colour schemes and designs I've seen from an ECHL team, and it makes me wonder if Zawyer Sports and Entertainment opted for safe over creative in order to fall in line with their affiliates. That seems like a rather crazy statement to make until you realize that the Savannah Ghost Pirates was the Vegas-Henderson ECHL affilate for the last few seasons, and they looked rather similar to the Knight Monsters in their jersey designs.

If the ECHL is just opting to use a white jersey, a black jersey, and a solid colour alternate jersey, things are going to get real boring in that league. The requirements for a Zawyer-owned team seems to be that one jersey seems to require a chest stripe, they all need to have variations of logos as shoulder patches, and there can't be any fun like scales or ghost ships added to the jerseys. Minor-league hockey is supposed to be fun, but these don't feel fun at all.

As far as the jerseys go, they check all the boxes for what a hockey jersey needs: good striping, solid contrasts in colours to make logos pop, and one of the logos tells you who is playing. The black jersey's logo is a little tougher to decipher without a few clues, and I've already seen a few people mistake the knight monster for a dragon on the gold jersey and think it's some sort of Flames logo. I'm a fan of keeping things simple, but casual hockey fans likely aren't thinking "Knight Monsters" when they see the logo.

Are they perfect? No, but they are serviceable. I would have liked a little more creativity to go into the jerseys, but I understand there are timeframes where things have to be completed if they're going to be seen on the ice in 2024-25. Maybe we'll see the Knight Monsters get a little more creative with their promotional jerseys, but tonight's jersey unveiling was pretty underwhelming.

And that's not really the reaction any monster wants, is it?

Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!