The NAHL season isn’t even finished yet, but expansion news is WHITE HOT, as the league announced its newest team in Maryland just a couple weeks back. Today that team got a new name and logo, folks, meet the Maryland Black Bears.

Here’s a look at the logo they will use during their first season in the NAHL’s East Division:

Hey, it’s pretty good! It’s a nice looking bear that is easy to identify, has some simple trees in it, and uses the colors of the Maryland flag pretty well. All-in-all, it’s a solid logo and the team should have a sharp look on the ice in their first season.

But.

There’s always a but.

There’s something about this logo that will look very familiar to fans of sports blogs, particularly those of SB Nation sites. Take a look at a big group of their logos and what they look like. Then take a second look at the Maryland Black Bears logo.

Those are their NFL sites, and boy does it look similar to what Maryland has. In fact, it almost looks like they’ve been made by the same group who did all those logos for SB Nation.

If the University of Maryland were the Black Bears or Bears, you could easily see the logo the hockey team has being used as their SB Nation  site logo for The Bears Den or whatever they named it.

But it’s not just SB Nation that it looks like, it’s all of hockey and their alternate or third logos that teams use on alternate jerseys or their shoulder patches. Take a look at these six from the NHL:

Now, not all of those are in rotation anymore, but they have all been worn in the near-past, or are still worn by their teams today.

I mean, those star wipes on the Maryland logo are very similar to the ones on the Minnesota Wild logo. I don’t think any of the above logos are bad per se, or that the Maryland one is, but it is kind of boring to see the same trend repeated over and over again, mainly in hockey.

So yeah, Maryland has a new hockey team and logo, and it’s pretty good in all honesty, but it seems familiar and kind of repetitive.