This week in uniforms and logos: How can a Native American sports nickname be respectful?

I hope everyone enjoyed their holiday. Here's what happened in the world of sports logos and uniforms while you were too busy recovering from your various food and beverage hangovers to notice.

We'll start things off with some positive news out of the Pacific Northwest ...

In these days of offensive Native American sports team nicknames and logos, one Minor League Baseball franchise is trying something new.

The Spokane Indians, Single-A affiliate of the Texas Rangers, will display their team name in Salish, the language of the local Spokane Tribe of Indians, on the front of their home jerseys for 2014, and they're doing so with the full support of the tribe.

“The Spokane Indians baseball organization has been very respectful and very kind,” Spokane tribal chairman Rudy Peone told the Indian Country Today Media Network. “The Spokane Indians are not the Spokane Savages, not the Spokane insert-derogatory-word here. It was named specifically after us."

Displaying the team logo in the tribe's native language certainly shows the team is serious about their club's branding being an homage to their people rather than an outdated, cartoonish, offensive stereotype. The team first introduced a Salish-version of their logo in 2006 with the blessing of the tribe, even wearing it as a patch on the sleeve of their jersey. Currently, the furthest the ballclub goes to invoking Native American imagery in their logos and uniforms is via a small feather under the "S" on their team caps.

“We have a very positive relationship with the local tribes.", said Indians co-owner Andy Billig in that same piece, "We would talk with them from time-to-time to check in and say, ‘How are we doing?’ Even if we weren’t using any imagery, the name of the team was still the Spokane Indians and we knew that could potentially be sensitive."

It appears the Indians are going above and beyond what anyone in professional sports with a Native-inspired brand have done before, it should serve as a template for how any teams who choose to continue going down that path to go ahead doing so. In Spokane both the team and the tribe are quite satisfied with how things are going.

"In our last meeting, last Spring, they talked about changing their uniforms and using the Salish spelling for their team. That was received very well from us. They don’t have any imagery that would be not very flattering and we appreciate that", Peone added.

Regardless of how well things are working out in Spokane, methinks, the Washington NFL Football Club would have to do a little more than using the local tribe language to spell out their nickname. Right? Well done, Spokane.

In the NBA, a report last week from the Toronto Star's Doug Smith (who knows a guy who knows a guy) suggests the Toronto Raptors are considering a switch to black-and-gold as their primary colour scheme for the 2015-16 season.

Smith's source says it's "by no means a done deal" but it's something they've been kicking around.

The Raptors, of course, have employed local rapper and their most famous fan, Drake, to help promote the team as well as aid in their rebranding efforts. Similar to how the Brooklyn Nets brought Jay-Z on board to help with their new look prior to last season... and while Jay-Z turned the Nets into an extension of his black-and-white-and-nothing-else image, a switch to black-and-gold by the Raptors would essentially be Drake doing the exact same thing.

Tim Leiwke, the President and CEO of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, the group who owns the Toronto Raptors, told the Toronto Sun that the club is "looking at a few different ideas." One of the ideas is creating a consistent colour scheme across the city of Toronto by going blue-and-white to match the NHL's Maple Leafs and baseball's Blue Jays.

In a wild fit of speculation on my part, while the Raptors announced they would retain their name, they didn't say they'd keep the dinosaur as the focal point of the brand. A "raptor" is also a common term for a bird of prey, Drake uses an owl as his personal logo. An owl, being a bird of prey, is a raptor. Something to think about.

Elsewhere in the NBA, we'll see the associations latest uniform gimmick this Friday night when the Brooklyn Nets and Miami Heat face-off in a game in which players will wear their nicknames on the back of their jerseys instead of their last names.

We're still waiting for the full roster of nicknames to be released but we already know LeBron will be wearing "King James" on his jersey, Ray Allen evoking a character he played in a film with "J. Shuttlesworth", and Paul Pierce will have "Truth" on his. Brooklyn's Andrei Kirilenko was rejected after he wanted to go with "AK-47" his actual nickname (isn't this the idea of this whole thing?), he'll instead honour his homeland by wearing the Russian spelling of his last name "Кириленко".

Can't fault them for trying something new, one criticism I've heard most often is that this now puts the focus on uniform onto the player rather than the team kinda killing the whole idea of "playing for the name on the front, not the name on the back".

While we wrapped up 2013 on here a couple weeks back with a year-in-review we also handed out the awards for the best and worst new logos of the year over on SportsLogos.Net as rated by the readers of the site. Please check that out, I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

Chris Creamer is the creator and editor of SportsLogos.net. You can follow him on twitter at @sportslogosnet.