Monday, July 09, 2007

Rio Grande Valley Vipers


On the other end of the D-League spectrum from the Iowa Energy is the Rio Grande Valley Vipers. Thanks again to Mike for emailing me this logo.

The name Vipers isn't unique, in fact, it's pretty overused. Just off the top of my head I can name the Calgary Vipers of the Northern League and the Tennessee Valley Vipers of af2, and I know there are more. But at least it makes some sense. Snakes are quite common in the RGV and the team calls Dodge Arena home and Dodge produces the popular Viper sports car. It's not a great reason to choose a nickname, but at least there's an OK reason, albeit unofficial.

But where the name leaves something to be desired, the logo more than makes up for it. I have to applaud the Vipers management for going with something so clean, compact and simple. The Vipers nickname invites people to go crazy design-wise, whether it be the cartoon in Calgary or the unnecessary craziness of Tennesee Valley. But the RGV Viper is very life-like and comes off as a lot more intimidating. And instead of holding onto the necessary sport identifier that we see in all of these logos, it is naturally slithering around it.

I also am a fan of this logo because there's no outline of the state of Texas anywhere, and I like to pretend that the basketball is the same snarling basketball in the Energy logo and it's about to be put out of it's misery by a far superior logo.

Team: Rio Grande Valley Vipers
League: D-League or NBDL - I can't remember what they want to be called now.
Location: Hidalgo, Texas - the greater McAllen metroplex
Arena: Dodge Arena

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2 Comments:

At 3:29 AM, Blogger Dave2 said...

Sweet. What's even more impressive? It's a duo-tone print! (even though it would undoubtedly be screened in 4-colors to get nice solid grays).

 
At 6:51 PM, Blogger TSBAllStars3 said...

Well done. Artistically the logo is great even though as you stated they weren't very creative on the team name.

Keep up the great work and I'm always looking forward to the next post.

 

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