Vancouver takes a step in the wrong direction

Today, the Canucks officially unveiled their "new" logo and sweater. I'm not digging it.
As expected, the giant C in the Orca logo has changed a bit. Now it's white on the bottom half. At least on the home sweaters. That part wasn't any surprise. I think most people would have preferred to have left it blue, but at least it wasn't a surprise.

The surprise, however, was in the form of the word VANCOUVER arched above the logo. This is bad. Bad. Bad. Bad. I have never been a fan of a sports team logo where the name of the team/city is spelled out in addition to some stylized logo. This is why I have always disliked the Lightning logo.
If there is no logo, it's fine to spell out the name. Like the Rangers sweaters with the block letters.

In some cases, I'm willing to bend a bit if the name of the city/team is incorporated into the logo (i.e. Oilers), but when it stands apart from the logo, it's unattractive to me.

I just watched the sweater launch, and I can't wait to hear the commentary from people who are actual Canucks fans. I'm just a closet Canucks fan. My voice doesn't count.

I just got an e-mail with a heads-up on a great piece about the sweater unveiling that just appeared in the National Post. In the pictures, note how ridiculously close Naslund's "C" is to the VANCOUVER wordmark. Looks like something a kid would throw together using Microsoft Paint. This quote, from the story, sums it up pretty well:

Bleached-out Orca logo? Numbers on the sleeves? Hastily ironed-on and painfully unnecessary city name crammed in for good measure? We think Canucks Captain Markus Naslund grimly apologetic half-smile in the first photo says it all: Yep. Kind of lame.

I can imagine that sales of the new sweater have been less than "brisk".

Now, to be fair, there are some good things about the new sweater.

The inclusion of the color green. From what I understand, this is one of the "official" colors of British Coloumbia.

The old "Stick and rink" secondary logo on the shoulders. Why wasn't this there before?

Tasteful horizontal stripes rather than hobo patches. The Islanders sure screwed the pooch on that one.

Secondary logo on the pants.

Then again.... the Orca theme and the "new" color scheme and the addition of the stripes are kinda reminding me of this.