Best of Sport... team name trivia!

Teams, teams, teams… as any pub quizzer will know, choosing a suitable team name is a skill and an art.

Some get it right. Some get it hopelessly wrong.

So here, taken directly from the question cards on LOGO – Best of Sport & Leisure, are three great team names to inspire you. Three nations, three sports, three very different approaches. And some silly-but-true stories to share between games.

Remember, Best of Sport & Leisure is a hardcore-stats-nerd free zone - making it the sporty board game for ALL the family!

So here we go with...

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The Tall Blacks!

• The world’s best-named national basketball team.

If you’re a New Zealander, you’ll cheer on the Tall Blacks every time men’s Basketball appears on the telly – it’s the long-established nickname of their national team. Proving that – whilst they might not be the greatest global achievers in the sport – you can always rely on the Kiwis for a sense of humour.

The Tall Blacks win the crown for best-named national basketball team in the world – and they win it easily. Elsewhere in the world, it doesn’t seem to be a sport that inspires original thinking.

Other nations tend to go down the cliched ‘strong-and-heroic-animal’ route (lions, dragons etc.) Or they simply approach that naming task with no imagination whatsoever.

Spare a thought for those stoic German fans, who get behind team ‘Basketballnationalmannschaft’ - which literally means ‘Basketball National Team’.

Go, Basketballnationalmannschaft!!!

 

The Cherry Blossoms!

• The world’s most confidently-named national rugby union team.

If those strong-and-heroic-animals are regularly found in Basketball, they’re all over the place in the rugby world. (Bulls, rhinos, lions AGAIN…) After all, these are obvious choices for a sport that exists on the basis of eye-wateringly painful physical contact.

So, let’s doff our scrum cap to the Japanese, and their selection of ‘The Cherry Blossoms’ as the name for their national men’s Rugby Union team. Whimsical and delicate, it not only honours the country’s national flower, it conveys a serene sense of confidence and chilled-outness.

THEIR fifteen players need no outwardly-fierce emblems in order to assert strength and dominance. (As far higher-ranked nations have occasionally found to their embarrassment).

 

The Pittsburgh Pirates!

• The world’s snarkiest-named baseball team.

Arrrrrr!!! Ahoy, mateys! Shiver-me-timbers! Those sea-dog baseball players from the yardarm-hanging US city of Pittsburgh draw on their buccaneering maritime history to…

Pittsburgh is literally hundreds of miles from the sea. In resolutely landlocked Pennsylvania. It’s basically famous for making steel. And Heinz Tomato Ketchup.

So why the ‘pirates’?

The naval moniker dates back to a slightly underhand pieces-of-eight-style transfer deal back in the nineteenth century. After the Pittsburgh team swiped one of their rivals’ best players, they were bitterly accused of ‘piracy’ by their critics. Demonstrating exactly how little this slur bothered them, the fans proceeded to refer to their team accordingly. Scurvy knaves, the lot of them.

 

LOGO – Best of Sport & Leisure is available online and in toy and game retailers everywhere!