There’s room for teasin’ from two Southern California teams in the NHL this week. Just two days after the Anaheim Ducks did so, the Los Angeles Kings have decided to join in.
Last night, the Kings—wildly rumoured to be getting a new logo—changed their profile photo to show just the outline of their 1988-98 “Gretzky Era” logo, leading many fans to assume the club was simply going back to that original logo. You know, it’s never that easy, folks!
The shape didn’t look quite right to me, so I did some comparison work. The new shape features a wider top and bottom and less of an angle on the slanted sides of the logo.
Here’s an overlay: the outline of the original 1988-98 logo is shown in silver, and the outline of yesterday’s teaser for 2024-25 is in white. You can clearly see it’s not the same shape, which means it’s not the same logo:
So what does that mean? We’re probably getting a modernized version of the original. It also means that Joe and Jill Q. Fan likely won’t notice a difference, but you detail-oriented logo fans absolutely will (and will have fun correcting them, I’m sure). And based on what’s leaked, it looks to be the same deal with the new Anaheim Ducks designs.
What could be modernized? Aside from the clear difference in shape, the original Kings logo could stand to use a different typeface, though that might be too ingrained into that design to be altered too much. A much easier element to update would be the crown at the bottom of the logo; I’ll be keeping an eye on that whenever this gets released, probably sometime in the next week.
Over their nearly 60 years in the NHL, the Los Angeles Kings have bounced around from design to design. They started off with purple (yes, “Forum Blue”) and gold before going to black and silver for the 1990s. A return to purple for the 21st century was replaced with a return to the ’90s look in the 2010s. Now, here in the 2020s, it looks as if a full-on return to that logo style of 1988 to 1998 is on the way. The logo that would be replaced, used as a primary since 2011 but as an alternate prior to that, was worn for both of the Stanley Cup Championships won by this franchise.
LINK: Los Angeles Kings all-time logo and uniform history, 1967-2024
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