The Portland Winterhawks have always been associated with the Chicago Blackhawks. There hasn’t been any helping that.
When you adopt the same logo as one of the most popular NHL teams, that’s what happens. People see the same Native American profile on the Winterhawks jersey as they do the Blackhawks, and they instantly think of the NHL franchise in Chicago, not the WHL one in Portland.
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For the Blackhawks, the logo represents Sauk Warrior leader Black Hawk, which has been an issue of debate and has been in place since Frederic McLaughlin founded the team in 1926. McLaughlin coincidentally purchased the Portland Rosebuds and placed their players in Blackhawks uniforms to form his new NHL team. The Winterhawks continued the Portland-to-Chicago hockey connection in 1976 when then-owner Brian Shaw moved the junior franchise from Edmonton to Portland, named his team the Winterhawks and purchased jerseys from the Blackhawks to use for that season.
The logo has stuck with the Winterhawks ever since even though there is no official affiliation between the Winterhawks and Blackhawks. For most — but maybe not Henri Jokiharju who played for the Winterhawks and then was drafted by the Blackhawks — that has often created confusion.
“People think we’re affiliated with the Blackhawks,” said Winterhawks vice president, general manager and head coach Mike Johnston, who has been with the organization on and off for 11 seasons. “To be honest, in the state of Oregon, they don’t understand where we fit in. Because most times in the U.S., you know, you have you go to college, then you go pro. And in basketball, football, baseball, that’s the steppingstone. So they don’t really understand where junior hockey fits in, and we really need to help them understand by having our own identity and showing that we’re a junior franchise in Portland, and we’re not affiliated with an NHL team, but we produce NHL players. We really need the city of Portland, and we’ve been there a long time, to really understand what we are about.”
Michael Kramer began to ponder this conundrum when he and Kerry Preete became managing partners of the Winterhawks on Jan. 1. Kramer had come to learn of the Winterhawks and the grand hockey history of Portland later in life and recognized that understanding wasn’t shared by a lot of people. He sought to change that.
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“I would have never thought that Portland had the history in hockey that it really does,” Kramer said. “And as I started to sort of go through and learn more about it, the fact that hockey has been there since 1914. The fact that Portland is the first U.S. city to have its name engraved on the Stanley Cup. It’s had several professional teams there in various leagues. The Portland Winterhawks, in itself, had been there 45 years and put, I think, 147 or 143 NHL draft picks coming out of that program, 30 first-round picks. And you just sort of go through it, the multiple Memorial Cups and league championships and stuff like that. It was just amazing to me that there was this rich, deep history in Portland that no one really knows about because everybody thinks about hockey as sort of a Midwest-, East Coast-type thing.”
With no real ties to the Blackhawks or the Native American logo, it only made sense for Kramer to explore altering it to represent something that could be more identified with the Winterhawks, the local hockey history, the city of Portland and the geographic region.
That led to a seven-month process that culminated with the Winterhawks revealing their new logo on Wednesday.
The process began with the franchise deciding to keep Winterhawks as its name. Kramer and others determined there was too much history in the name to discard it. But how to go about the logo? The Winterhawks, with the help of Marcus Harvey, the founder of Portland Gear, and Brian Gundell, a local designer, went about crafting a new logo to fit them.
“So what we did is we said, ‘OK, we want a professional designer and we want people from the team and we want people who understand the real community to sort of come together and work on it’ and that was our working team,” Kramer said. “From my standpoint, it was very important that we had something Oregon or Oregon tie to it, so that’s the driver behind the Mount Hood picture. (The overall logo’s) a white-colored hawk, sort of modeled off the anatomy of a red-tail hawk. The feathers are snowy white to represent the winter and the ice that we skate on.
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“There are (two) feathers in the head that are designed to be a little bit of a legacy to our old logo. But they’re not different colors and they’re not Indian feathers, but there is this look of the feathers in there. There’s a silhouette of Mount Hood. Within the Mount Hood silhouette, there is snowcaps and buried within the snowcaps is a hidden W and H for the Winterhawks. On that, we’ve stuck with the red, but we’ve added sort of the championship gold because that’s what we sort of strive for — to have some championships. Then we’ve added a new color called squall gray, which is kind of an icy or wintry color. ”
While Kramer did mention the feathers were not based on Native American tradition, he also said the decision to change the logo had nothing to do with the debate over sports teams using Native American imagery as logos and mascots.
“We’re apolitical,” Kramer said. “I know there is a debate on both sides, and I think the real driver for me personally was the individual identity. We want to be Portland. I don’t want to be … While I have all the respect in the world for Chicago and the Blackhawks and everything they’ve done, you know, when people see us, they think that there’s some affiliation, and we want to stand on our own.”
The Winterhawks did still give the Blackhawks a heads up on the decision to change their logo.
“We told them we were as a courtesy,” Kramer said. “We have a very good relationship with them, like many other teams. … They said, thanks and appreciate the update.”
Kramer has been nervously excited to reveal the logo on Wednesday. As pleased as he was with the reasoning behind the logo and how it came out, he also understood change can be difficult. He gets that, too.
“It’s really hard, I think, from our standpoint, as an organization to say, you’re going to change from something that you’ve had for 45 years, right,” Kramer said. “Yeah, we’re biased, we think it’s one of the most accomplished organizations in hockey and we’re changing something that there’s now. From our standpoint, the crest, it’s not just the logo, it’s more than that. We want to send a message to the world that we stand on our own. When people look at our old logo, they think of the Blackhawks. We are going in a direction. We want people to look at our logo and say, that’s the Winterhawks. We’ve never had that before.
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“They have built brand equity into their logo. Frankly (laughing), we’ve probably helped them build that equity into the logo. We want people in the hockey world to say, that is the Winterhawks, that is Portland, that is the success of that team. And so we thought that this was sort of the first step in doing that. So it’s pretty exciting for us. The other thing that sort of hit me is, if you think about it, Portland is kind of the athletic apparel capital of the world. Where Oregon is with Nike, Adidas hockey and all that kind of stuff. And we’re sitting there, right in the middle of it, and we’re using borrowed jerseys. We should be playing to the roots of our area.”
Johnston had gone through a logo change when he was the coach of the University of New Brunswick, so the idea wasn’t new to him. He got used to it then and knew he would now. More than anything, Johnston agreed with ownership’s reasons for change.
“Our identity and who we are, the Portland Winterhawks, is not going to change, our logo will change,” Johnston said. “So I just thought it made sense when they first brought it up because I recognized (the city’s hockey history) when I came to Portland originally.”
Once the Winterhawks finalized the logo, the organization has been going through the painstaking process of replacing the old one with the new one. As Kramer has learned, they’re everywhere.
“You don’t realize how many different places your identity really sits,” Kramer said with a laugh. “Over the years, the previous ownership has toyed with lots of different secondary logos, so there’s lots of different things. We have a ‘P’ logo. We have a rose logo. We have a whole bunch of different things that are out there. So again, that was another sort of driver. A lot of different assets that we have were being presented with different branding and we wanted to sort of tie it all together.
“So websites, apps, jerseys, within the arena, within the locker room, logo in the middle of the locker room, we have a big board in our locker room that shows the names and years that all the people that got drafted that had it on there, letterhead, email addresses, just everywhere. We own one of the local rinks. There’s the Winterhawks Skating Center in Beaverton, Ore. Branding that and making sure that’s tied together. Our youth hockey team has a different logo, so what do they have. Really there’s a lot more that goes into it than just say, hey, we’re going to change it, and that was a real shocker to me, actually.”
(Photo of Jonas Brondberg: Christopher Mast / Getty Images)
