Brooklyn's NBA team could have been called the Swamp Dragons
Imagine all those Brooklyn hipsters running around in Swamp Dragons T-shirts.
It sounds too good be true, right? But it really could have happened. Here's how.
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ESPN's Zach Lowe published an oral history Friday, recounting how, two decades ago, the New Jersey Nets nearly changed their name to the New Jersey Swamp Dragons. Even for lifelong NBA fans, this a deep piece of fun basketball trivia. For everyone else, it's a hilarious tale of what might have been.
Here's how Jon Spoelstra, who was the New Jersey Nets president at the time, recounts the idea coming up.
I was sitting in my office with Jim Lampariello, our vice president, and I just said, "Every time I look out the window here, I see this swamp. And every time I think of swamps, I think of swamp rats. What about that?"
He just said, "I don't think that's very nice. What about Swamp Dragons?" I loved it. Dragons are mythical, and fun.
Spoelstra (who is also the father of current Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra) was able to rally support for the idea. According to Lowe's piece, the team even chose a teal, purple and black color palette and commissioned a designer to sketch out potential logos.
So what happened? League franchise owners voted 26-1 to approve the name change, according to Lowe, but there was just one problem. The lone dissenting vote came from one of the Nets' seven owners, David Gerstein. The Nets' ownership group at the time rotated voting responsibilities for such league procedures, and it was Gerstein's turn when the Swamp Dragons vote came up. He just couldn't pull the trigger. The owner of a team voting against a name change to his own team nullified the vote, per league rules.
"The name just wasn't right," Gerstein tells Lowe. "I mean, would they be the Brooklyn Swamp Dragons today?"
The franchise moved from New Jersey to Brooklyn in 2013, keeping its Nets nickname and shoving the Swamp Dragons flirtation further into the past.
Now go check out Lowe's full article -- it's worth doing so for the amazing logo mockups alone.
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Sam Laird is Mashable's Senior Sports Reporter. He covers the wide, weird world of sports from all angles -- as well as occasional other topics -- from Mashable's San Francisco bureau. Before joining Mashable in November 2011, his freelance work appeared in publications including the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Slam, and East Bay Express. Sam is a graduate of UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, and basketball and burritos take up most of his spare time. Follow him on Twitter @samcmlaird.
