There are 122 professional sports franchises in North America spread among 47 cities and four dominant sports leagues: American football’s NFL, baseball’s MLB, basketball’s NBA, and ice hockey’s NHL. Of these, 98 franchises have been around for 25 years or longer, meaning they have had ample time to fully experience several good and bad eras. By determining the percentage of games they’ve won in their complete history, we can arrive at an average of each team’s overall historical quality.

Not surprisingly, most teams are clustered right around the 50% mark give or take five or six percent. Some teams stand out somewhat above the others, like the Montreal Canadiens in the NHL and the New York Yankees in baseball, while others fall significantly below the mark, like the Pittsburgh Penguins in hockey and the New Orleans Saints in American football. But no team in any major North American sport so historically dominates that it’s fans are treated to more than a 60% rate of winning its games, and no city’s fans are made to suffer a team that wins less than 40% of its games. No city’s fans, that is, except for those who cheer the Vancouver Canucks.

The Vancouver Canucks all time winning percentage stands out among all 98 other 25-year-old or older professional sports franchises in North America for having the only sub-40% winning rate. They come in at 39%.

Some teams younger than 25 years have lower rates, but they have the excuse that it’s difficult to win during the early years of a new franchise. By the time any franchise is 25 years or older, it has employed several managers, coaches, and star players, and has probably even had a few different owners and buildings to play in. By that age, teams have had a chance to build, to fall apart, and to re-build again several times over.

In their 38 years, the Vancouver Canucks have played in two buildings, have had three different owners, nine general managers, 16 head coaches, eleven captains, 36 first-round draft picks, and five different team logos. None of these numbers is wildly out of sync with those of any other long-term team in hockey or the other sports, with the possible exception of their number of logos. All 98 long-term teams in all sports have had good and bad owners, great and poor buildings, smart and dumb managers, successful or not coaches, effective and ineffective captains, quality and poor draft picks, and good-looking or ugly logos. Yet none of the other 97 long-term teams in any major sport in North America has managed to win less than 40% of their total games.

What can account, then, for the outstanding historical anomaly that is the Vancouver Canucks? There is one other element to the Canucks in which they are also in a league of their own besides being the only sub-40% winning team. They carry the only team nickname in all of North American professional sports whose meaning (and even pronunciation) is not widely known. Some others are admittedly a bit obscure. The New York Knicks of basketball used to be the Knickerbockers, a type of Dutch clothing popular in New York in the 19th Century. The Los Angeles Dodgers of baseball, which used to be the Brooklyn Dodgers, are so named because citizens of Brooklyn used to have dodge out of the way of the ubiquitous streetcars. The Chicago White Sox and Boston Red Sox of baseball use a strange spelling of “socks.” And the Boston Bruins use a slightly obscure and more poetic term for “bears.” Finally, the San Francisco 49ers require a bit of historical knowledge: during the California gold rush in 1849, the type of desperate man who crowded San Francisco streets afterward was known as a “49er.” No other team nickname presents any mystery to locals or visitors alike. None, that is, except for the Vancouver Canucks.

Even local sports fans are in disagreement about what the nickname means. It could be a racial slur for “Canadian,” it could be a Quebecois term for a style of clothing, it could be a First Nations term for a kind of wind, or it could even be a derivation of a Hawaiian native term. Some point to a mid-last Century comic strip that featured a character named Johnny Canuck. Some World War II veterans recall the word used by Europeans describing Canadians. Those unfamiliar with the word, which includes almost everyone outside Vancouver, often mispronounce it as “ca-NOOKS.”

Whatever it is, it’s a strange thing to name a team after. Most other sports teams in North America are named for animals (50), people (39), objects like socks and airplanes (18), or weather phenomenon and geography (11). Vancouver’s hockey team is either named for a person, a people, an object, or a weather phenomenon, or none of the above, and the Canucks website doesn’t offer to clear up the issue. Most sports teams in North America, furthermore, use nicknames associated in some way with danger (38), with names like Sharks, Tigers and Warriors, with power (15) with names like Kings, Wizards and Giants, or with fear (10) with names like Heat, Lightning, and Avalanche. By contrast, there is nothing dangerous, powerful, or fearsome about a Canuck.

Others are clearly tied to some important local industry, like the Milwaukee Brewers, the Pittsburgh Steelers, or the Edmonton Oilers. But there is nothing locally relevant about the word “Canucks” no matter what meaning one ascribes to it. The name stands out among all 122 major professional sports teams in North America as the only one that causes neither fear, nor trepidation nor even recognition among visitors, but rather only confusion.

Nicknames for sports teams have never been regarded as a relevant factor in the teams performance. But the fact that the Canucks are the only team with an historical winning percentage below 40%, and also the only team with an unusual and misunderstood nickname, all other factors being normal, suggests a possible link.

Nicknames are generally regarded as part of a team’s marketing effort only. But players have often indicated an elevated sense of pride when donning the sweater bearing the logo and name of storied franchises like the Montreal Canadiens and the New York Yankees, an elevated pride that might account for a few extra ounces of effort on the field or on the ice.

If great nicknames have a slightly positive influence on players, then poor nicknames may well have a slightly negative influence on them. Brian “Spinner” Spencer, in an infamous live post-game interview shortly after being traded from the Toronto Maple Leafs to the then-new Pittsburgh Penquins, scoffed at the name and tore the shirt off his back. When the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim first entered the league (being named for a fictional children’s team in a Disney movie), some players reported feeling ashamed for literally playing for a Mickey Mouse-related team. For younger professional athletes, it is reasonable to suppose that it feels better to pull on a sweater that says Eagles, Pirates, or Red Wings than to pull one on that says Ducks, Nets, or, worst of all, Canucks. All other things being equal in the long term, a poor name might cause just enough of a loss of pride in players and a consequent slight deflation of energy to lose those few games a year they might have won that, over a few decades, adds up to a sub-par historical average. Having the worst nickname in all of professional sports may well account for an otherwise inexplicable lone sub-40% winning percentage.

The Vancouver hockey franchise has changed everything about itself sometimes several times over, from owners to buildings to logos to general managers, in a futile attempt to escape the basement among all major sports franchises in North America. The only thing they haven’t changed is their nickname, the one thing that may account for their record worst performance in all of North American sports. If Vancouver hockey fans want to see more wins than losses, or at least as many wins as most other fans get to enjoy, it may be time to lobby the team’s new owner for a new, and more meaningful, nickname.