Two owners swapped one club for another, then asked the public for a name.

The San Jose Sharks came out of a deal over a different team. English Wikipedia says the brothers Gordon and George Gund III, who had been involved in Bay Area hockey since the California Golden Seals of the 1970s, later owned the Minnesota North Stars. By 1988 a group led by Howard Baldwin, a former owner of the Hartford Whalers, was pressing the NHL for a team in San Jose, where a new arena was being built. The league settled on a compromise: the Gunds would sell their share of the North Stars to Baldwin’s group, receive an expansion team in the Bay Area, and be allowed to take a number of North Stars players with them.

Wikipedia dates the sale to 5 May 1990 and the league’s approval of the new franchise to 9 May 1990, with play to begin in the 1991–92 season. A Bay Area club needed a name that would work across the region, and the owners put the question to the public.

The club ran a national “Name the New NHL Team” sweepstakes. The team’s own history page says entries arrived from across North America and beyond, offering sea creatures, fictional characters and even computer components, and lists a top fifteen that included Blades, Condors, Fog, Golden Gaters, Redwoods, Sea Lions, Waves and Sharks. Wikipedia, citing Michael Leo Donovan’s 1997 book The Name Game, says “Blades” placed ahead of “Sharks,” but that the Gunds were concerned about the name’s possible association with weapons and chose the runner-up.

The team says management wanted a name that would appeal to children and adults and that would inspire graphic logo applications for uniforms, merchandise, promotional items and hockey education materials. Matt Levine, then the club’s executive vice president of marketing and broadcast, is quoted on the same page saying the club had considered several alternatives before the sweepstakes and that the entrants’ creativity helped.

The early home was not in San Jose. Wikipedia says the Sharks played their opening two seasons at the Cow Palace in Daly City, just outside San Francisco, and moved to the new San Jose Arena for the 1993–94 season. That building is now SAP Center at San Jose, known locally, Wikipedia says, as “the Shark Tank.”

Pacific teal, a triangle and a mascot from a Zamboni.

The main mark has stayed close to its 1991 form. Wikipedia says the logo of a shark biting a hockey stick has been used since the inaugural 1991–92 season, with slight modifications before the 2007–08 season. The shark bursts through a triangle, which Wikipedia says refers to the Red Triangle, a stretch of Pacific coastline off the Bay Area. The club also uses a family of partial and alternate marks built from the primary logo.

Colour gave the club its strongest signature. Wikipedia lists the team colours today as Pacific teal, white, black and orange. A 2001 book on the club’s early years, cited by Wikipedia, was titled Decade of Teal. The original coloured jersey, Wikipedia says, was teal with white, grey and black striping and white block lettering trimmed in black, while the white jersey reversed that with teal lettering. Both carried a “fin” logo on the shoulders, and the set stayed in use until the 1997–98 season.

The second generation darkened the teal. Wikipedia says a new jersey arrived as an alternate in 1997–98 with a deeper teal base, wide grey striping on the sleeves and shoulders and modernised lettering, and became a primary jersey alongside a white partner the following season. In 2001–02 the club added a black third jersey, bringing back the fin logo on the shoulders with simple teal and white sleeve stripes.

The mascot arrived during the inaugural season. Wikipedia says that on 28 January 1992, during a game against the New York Rangers, an unnamed shark mascot emerged from a Zamboni during an intermission. A “Name the Mascot” contest began that night, and the name S. J. Sharkie was announced on 15 April 1992. Like the team name, the mascot’s name came from the public.

Design and documentation.

Hockey clubs often build their marks from things close to home. A crest can take the outline of the land a team plays on, reducing a coastline or an island to a shape simple enough to sit on a shoulder patch or a helmet decal. Weather offers another vocabulary: storm symbols, warning flags and swirling winds translate easily into flat colour and strong silhouettes that read at a distance and on a small screen.

Not every change sticks. A redesign can be introduced with fanfare and withdrawn within a few seasons when supporters push back, and the older mark returns, sometimes slightly refined. Those reversals show how much a logo carries for the people who wear it, and how a club’s visual history becomes part of its brand.

Throwback nights draw on that history directly. Clubs bring out sweaters, colours and logos from earlier eras for a handful of games, and the retail range follows. A new arena adds another layer: concourse graphics, ice markings, signage and naming-rights wordmarks all have to sit alongside the team’s own marks, so the building itself becomes part of how the brand looks on broadcast and in photographs.

New suppliers, local owners and a run of looks that keep coming back to the start.

The 2007 change of jersey template brought a new trim colour. Wikipedia says that when the league moved to Reebok’s Edge template, the Sharks introduced a teal home jersey with a black shoulder yoke and a white road jersey with a teal yoke, replaced grey with orange trim on stripes and lettering, added numbers on the right chest and put a full-body “jumping” shark on the shoulders. A black alternate followed for 2008–09 with the jumping shark in front and an “SJ” mark on the shoulders.

The next update pared that back. Luke Fox of Sportsnet reported on 20 August 2013 that the club’s new “Next Wave” sweaters for 2013–14 kept the teal, black and white scheme and the number on the front but removed the shoulder yoke, added old-style laces at the collar and dropped the waist stripes, which the team said lightened the jerseys, while Pacific teal became more prominent on the home set. Wikipedia adds that the new uniforms used less orange.

Later alternates reached into regional history. Wikipedia says a 2015 Stadium Series jersey in teal, white and black introduced a “Northern California” shoulder logo; a 2017 move to Adidas swapped in a “screaming shark” and the “SJ” mark on the shoulders and printed “This Is Sharks Territory” inside the neckline; and a black “Stealth” jersey in 2018 carried circuit-board sleeve striping. New uniforms in 2022 drew on the original 1991–98 set and moved the pants, gloves and home helmets to teal, while a Reverse Retro that year reworked the last uniforms of the California Golden Seals with “Sharks” in teal and gold. A black “Cali Fin” alternate came in 2023–24, and the 1997–2007 teal look returned for a 35th-anniversary run in 2025–26.

Ownership moved from the founding family to local investors. CBC Sports reported on 26 February 2002 that George Gund III had sold the team to a local investment group headed by the team president, Greg Jamison, with Gund staying on as a minority partner. ESPN, carrying an Associated Press report on 30 January 2013, said Hasso Plattner, the founder of the software company SAP, had bought out two fellow investors and would represent the team on the NHL Board of Governors; the report said he had been in the ownership group since 2002 and its majority owner since 2010. Wikipedia lists San Jose Sports & Entertainment Enterprises as the owner, with Plattner as governor.

For a design guide, the San Jose Sharks show how a colour can carry a club’s identity as firmly as its crest, with each new uniform measured against the teal of 1991. Compare it with Golden State Warriors and San Francisco 49ers, two other Bay Area clubs whose names and marks draw on the region. For this guide we use Pacific teal, rink black and trim orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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