According to MLive, the Detroit Free Press, Detroit News, WDIV and DetroitHockey.net’s Clark Rasmussen, the Red Wings have at least chosen to paint center ice at Little Caesars Arena with a plain Red Wings logo instead of the team’s “Hockeytown” moniker, and the Detroit News’s Ted Kulfan received a prepared statement from the team regarding the logo on Friday afternoon:
At center ice, we will debut a fresh, new look: the Winged Wheel, one of the most iconic logos in professional sports, will be prominently featured. Also, in the coming days, several new initiatives that celebrate the fans and passion of Hockeytown are scheduled to be announced.
The Wings have tended to employ a “Hockeytown”-less center ice logo for their annual fantasy camp, which took place this past week at LCA, for the last couple of seasons, so I wouldn’t exactly have suggested that fans freak out if the logo was different…
But if the Wings are “tuning down” their “Hockeytown” marketing campaign, as Rasmussen suggests, it strikes me as somewhat ironic, because it took 20-or-so years for the city and region to really develop into a place where elite hockey programs are present at every level at which the sport is played.
We’ll see whether this “sticks” to center ice come the regular season.
