With the New Orleans Pelicans becoming official, the Charlotte Bobcats opted for a name change as well. Read more after the jump.
The Charlotte Bobcats will go back to being the Charlotte Hornets.
From ProBasketballTalk
It’s going to happen, reports CBSSports.com’s Will Brinson at Eye On Basketball. CBS did a search and found that the NBA has started to prepare to move some digital properties over.
This is not going to happen next season, the league and its marketing arm usually likes a couple of years lead on these kinds of changes. It likely would be the fall of 2014 at the earliest.
Still, this is going to be welcomed in Charlotte by the fan base.
Charlotte the city is nicknamed the “hornets nest,” a moniker that dates all the way back to the Revolutionary War. That is when the British General Cornwallis had occupied the city but was driven out by residents there, leading him to call Charlotte “a hornet’s nest.” The residents took and still take pride in that. Go to Charlotte and even the police wear a patch with a hornet on it.
So the Charlotte Hornets made sense, but when George Shinn moved the team to New Orleans in 2002 he took the name with him. The expansion team that took their place in Charlotte was the Bobcats, a name that many felt owner Bob Johnson had basically chosen to name the team after himself.
Current owner Michael Jordan had put together a group to do studies and look at a possible name change. Apparently he’s decided to go forward with it.
