Here's why. These pelicans are bad dudes.
Source: s3-ec.buzzfed.com
Like the killer flocks in Hitchcock's classic The Birds, pelicans have descended on the city of New Orleans. They've blocked out the sun. They've incited terror. And they're making a lot of people mad on the Internet.
The New Orleans Hornets will be changing their name to the New Orleans Pelicans before the beginning of next season. "Hornets" was a name inherited from Charlotte, from whence the franchise fled after the 2002 season, and the New Orleans Hornets have never really caught on as a franchise — even during Chris Paul's heyday in the late 2000s, the Hornets rarely left the bottom-third of the league in terms of attendance. And the obvious re-labels for a New Orleans team would be music-related, but Utah retains the "Jazz" moniker it got when the previous New Orleans hoops squad moved there in 1979, despite the fact that there have only been five recorded instances of people playing, or even listening to, jazz music in Utah history. So New Orleans has to look elsewhere for inspiration.
Enter pelicans, flying in squadrons, because that's what flocks of pelicans are called, which of course you knew. A lot of initial reaction to the team's announcement has been incredulous, probably because Pelicans are a little goofy-looking.