A logo first, a fan vote second and an owner’s own suggestion.

The Nashville Predators began with a logo rather than a name. English Wikipedia says a group led by the Wisconsin businessman Craig Leipold made a formal presentation to the National Hockey League in January 1997, and in June the league granted conditional franchises to Nashville, Columbus, Atlanta and Minneapolis–Saint Paul. Nashville already had a finished arena downtown, and its team began play in the 1998–99 season.

On 25 September 1997, Leipold and the team president Jack Diller held a press conference to unveil the club’s emblem, a sabre-toothed cat, the species Smilodon fatalis. Wikipedia says the image referred to a partial Smilodon skeleton found beneath downtown Nashville in 1971, during construction of the First American National Bank building, now the UBS Tower. Only after the logo was public did the club turn to the name. According to Wikipedia, three candidates, Ice Tigers, Fury and Attack, were picked from 75 fan suggestions, and Leipold added his own entry, Predators. On 13 November 1997 he announced at a press conference that his suggestion had won.

The fossil story has been retold many times since. Reporting for WPLN News on 1 April 2022, Rose Gilbert wrote that during the summer of 1971 crews blasting limestone for the foundations of the First American Center hit a narrow crevasse filled with dirt, and that work stopped after a worker noticed a strange white object in the debris. John Dowd, a member of the Southeastern Indian Antiquities Survey, the group of amateur archaeologists brought in to excavate, told Gilbert that a sabre tooth was “the tooth that started it all.” Dowd said he had no idea the team had drawn on the find until the name and logo were announced in 1997, and that he did not mind. The Vanderbilt paleontologist Larisa DeSantis told Gilbert the bones belonged to Smilodon fatalis.

Gilbert described the logo as a snarling sabre-toothed tiger that appears all over Nashville, on billboards, yard signs, bumper stickers and merchandise. The team has played its home games downtown since 1998 at the arena now called Bridgestone Arena, which Wikipedia says was earlier known as the Gaylord Entertainment Center.

Navy, silver and mustard gold, then a cleaner cat in three colours.

The first uniforms put the cat on navy and white. Wikipedia says the original sweaters, worn from 1998 to 2007, had a silver yoke across the shoulders, with gold used only as an accent. The white jersey showed the primary logo against a navy triangle; the navy jersey used the same logo without it. From 1998 to 2004 a secondary logo showing the tower of the arena sat on the shoulders. From 2001 to 2007 the club wore a mustard gold third jersey with a front-facing view of the cat, which fans nicknamed the “Mustard Cats.” When the league moved to the Reebok Edge template in 2007, the city name was added above the logo, and from 2009 to 2011 a navy third jersey used black trim, a roundel showing the fossil cat, and a checkerboard pattern on the sleeves, tail and socks.

The identity was simplified in 2011. Chris Smith reported for the hockey-design blog icethetics on 22 June 2011 that the new logos were unveiled in Las Vegas on the day of the NHL Awards and used only blue, gold and white, dropping the orange, steel blue and silver of the original identity. Smith wrote that the new primary logo was a simplified version of the cat used since 1998 rather than a new drawing. Two secondary marks came with it: an NP lettermark and a shield shaped like a guitar pick carrying the three-star symbol from the Tennessee state flag. The wordmark kept its earlier layout but switched to a new typeface.

The uniforms followed in July. Sports Business Daily reported on 14 July 2011, citing Austen Gregerson of The Tennessean, that the new home sweaters were bright gold with blue trim and white piping, with fangs in the collar and guitar strings worked into the numbers and lettering. The design was revealed on a large banner hanging from the AT&T building downtown, under the slogan “Behold The Gold.” The coach at the time, Barry Trotz, said the guitar-pick shoulder patch and the three stars of Tennessee gave the jersey “a lot of Nashville identity.” The club’s chief executive, Jeff Cogen, told the paper that blue was not a dominant colour and that the team wanted the “sea of gold” seen in the stands during the playoffs. Wikipedia adds that piano keys run along the inside of the neckline.

Design and documentation.

Hockey clubs added during expansion periods usually begin with a blank sheet: a new name, a new crest and a set of colours chosen before a single game has been played. Those early decisions tend to lean on place. Designers often reach for local landscape, wildlife, regional history or a civic symbol, so that the mark feels rooted in the city even though the club itself is new. Colour names follow the same instinct, with teams describing their reds, greens, golds and blues through references to local industry, forests, rivers or civic heritage rather than plain swatch labels.

Crests also change over time. A club may introduce a sharper, more illustrative mark in one era, then later return to a simpler letterform or an older emblem drawn from the city’s earlier hockey history. These heritage returns are usually presented as a reconnection with the past and often arrive alongside new jerseys, refreshed wordmarks and updated arena graphics. Arenas carry their own visual traditions too, from goal songs and horns to banners and entrance rituals, and those elements become part of how a hockey brand is experienced as much as any logo printed on a sweater.

Gold helmets, throwbacks, Gnash and two fingers held like fangs.

Gold has stayed at the centre since 2011. Wikipedia says gold helmets became a permanent part of the home uniform from the 2016–17 season, after being worn on Saturday home games the season before, and that when the league moved to Adidas in 2017–18 the white road set gained more gold on the sleeves, shoulders and tail, with navy kept as trim.

Special uniforms have looked back to earlier Nashville hockey. For the 2020 Winter Classic, the Predators wore a design inspired by the Nashville Dixie Flyers of the Eastern Hockey League, with heavy gold stripes trimmed in navy, a script team name in the chest stripe and a felt-style navy cat on the left shoulder. The first “Reverse Retro” alternate, in 2020–21, reused the 1998–2007 design with gold as the base colour. For the 2022 Stadium Series at Nissan Stadium the club wore navy with a wide gold stripe across the front, carrying the word “Smashville” in large navy letters and the guitar-pick logo. A second Reverse Retro, in 2022–23, brought back the Mustard Cats design in the current athletic gold.

Much of the brand lives inside the arena. Rose Gilbert wrote for WPLN in 2022 that a giant sabre-toothed cat head with glowing eyes descends onto the ice at the start of every home game, that growling sound effects ring out after each Predators goal, and that during every power play fans raise and lower two curled fingers toward the ice, the gesture known as Fang Fingers. Wikipedia says the gesture is made to the horror sounds from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. The mascot is Gnash, an anthropomorphic sabre-toothed cat, whom Gilbert described as far less intimidating than the cat in the logo. Wikipedia says The Tennessean traces the custom of fans throwing a catfish onto the ice to 30 October 2003.

Ownership has changed in stages. Wikipedia says that in 2008 control passed from Leipold to a locally based group. Teresa M. Walker of the Associated Press reported on 17 June 2022 that the team’s chairman had agreed to sell most of his stake to the former Tennessee governor Bill Haslam in what the club called a “multi-phased purchase transaction” over several years, designed to make Haslam the majority owner.

For a design guide, the Nashville Predators show how a fossil, a guitar pick and one bright colour can carry a whole identity, with sound and gesture doing as much work in the arena as the crest. Compare the NHL, the Florida Panthers, another big-cat club of the 1990s, and the Minnesota Wild, whose owner Craig Leipold founded the Predators. For this guide we use Predators gold, night navy and ice white with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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