How about.. The New Orleans Gulf Walruses

With Tom Benson officially taking control of the team this week, read this Atlantic Cities article about the Hornets naming exercise we all know will end in disaster.

"I am fascinated and madly in love with several of the options," says Chris Trew, who is the Hornets’ unofficial team comedian (which is to say he is both a Hornets season-ticket holder and a full-time comedian who tends to show up at team events to film basketball-related sketch comedy). "And I’m terrified," he adds, "of some of the options as well."
It’s tough to cram any city’s identity into something that fits on the back of a basketball jersey. But this challenge is all the more awesome in New Orleans because… well, how to put this?
New Orleans "loathes those things that aren’t authentic," says writer Brett Michael Dykes, who's better known locally as the Cajun Boy. "That’s one of the things that so many people love about New Orleans, it’s one of the most real places you will ever visit."
And so we submit to Tom Benson that it is quite possible to screw this up in New Orleans in a way that’s not possible when you’re branding a sports franchise in, say, Reno or Kansas City. These people are absolutely not going to accept anything that’s boring, camp, or imperfect.

Update: I was thumbing through the comment thread under that article where some of the contributors suggested that "Hornets" fits better in Utah (the "Beehive State") than in Charlotte. This is dumb for a number of reasons but primarily because Hornets (much like "Fighting Tigers") has a historical origin not many people know about.

Originally, the new team was going to be called the Charlotte Spirit, but a name-the-team contest yielded "Hornets" as the winning choice. The name was derived from the city's fierce resistance to British occupation during the Revolutionary War,[2] which prompted the British commander, Lord Cornwallis, to refer to it as "a veritable nest of hornets." The name had been used for Charlotte sports teams before, including a minor league baseball team that was located in the city from 1901 to 1972, as well as a World Football League team that played there from 1974 to 1975. In addition, the Charlotte 49ers and Davidson Wildcats of the NCAA play annually for the Hornets' Nest Trophy.

Also, interestingly enough, Benson may very well tag the team with the once-rejected "Spirit" after all.