For the team banners, I ran into the same problem on the SNES 93 ROM. I used the tiling and made a bunch of available letters, so you could just look up the letters in a table then update the tile map in the ROM. Some teams needed custom banners because their names were longer.
It's explained here (2nd post): http://forum.nhl94.com/index.php?/topic/11734-nhlpa-hockey-93-64-team-rom/
However just shrinking the graphics so 34 fit is much simpler for modders to make ROMs with.