Is this the new Victoria WHL team name and logo?

As you saw from my last blog post, I was doing some searching through recently trademarked hockey names and logos; during my search I came across a simple trademark – “Royals” with a logo attached, registered to Westcoast Hockey Enterprises Ltd. on May 16, 2011 for “Entertainment services, namely, the operation of a hockey team made available to the public in live events and through the media of television and radio; organizing and promoting hockey tournaments and exhibitions.”

I saved the file in my archives not thinking much of it, until I did a little bit of searching today; enough to at least raise the possibility that “Victoria Royals” could indeed be the name and logo of the new Victoria WHL hockey team.

The first big bit of evidence is the team held a name-the-team vote with the following options:
Victoria Capitals
Victoria Dragons
Victoria Force
Victoria Royals
Victoria Tide
Victoria Thunder

Out of all those possibile names, only “Royals” has been registered for a new trademark.

If that wasn’t enough of a reason to believe:

Always the most reliable of sources, a Wikipedia search for Victoria Royals links to to a page saying “Deleted Victoria Royals… Article duplicates an existing topic, Victoria WHL Team”; interesting I thought.

A domain name lookup shows both victoriaroyals.com and victoriaroyals.ca were just registered privately on April 19, 2011.

To me it’s quite clear that this is the new name of the Victoria WHL team, I personally love the name – Victoria is obviously named after Queen Victoria, a royal, it’s simple, classic… I’m not sure I’m a fan of the logo but let’s wait until we see it in colour first before judging.