What they got was one of the biggest eyesores in American professional sports history, with huge "V's" (which supposedly was supposed to stand for "victory" and not necessarily "Vancouver") all over. For a fee of $100,000, they hired San Francisco-based marketing firm Beyl, Boyd and Turner to redesign their conservative uniforms. The white pants were the subject of massive ridicule and were quickly put to pasture.īut perhaps the most radical design to come out of the late 1970s was that of the Vancouver Canucks. They couldn't have been more wrong if they predicted they would go to the playoffs in their inaugural year (they won only eight games). That team decided it might look good if the players wore white pants with their red jerseys. In 1975, the NHL expanded into Washington, DC, with the Washington Capitals. The Seals changed to teal after Finley sold the team in 1974. He even had his players wear white skates! They looked like a bunch of figure skaters on the ice - and given their win-loss records, they kind of played like them too. He outfitted them in the same colors as he put his baseball team in - kelly green and gold. Finley bought the Oakland Seals and renamed them the California Golden Seals. The Los Angeles Kings introduced purple (officially Forum blue) to the NHL landscape, the Philadelphia Flyers reintroduced orange, and the California (later Oakland) Seals and Minnesota North Stars took to the ice wearing green.īut if the NHL thought they had seen it all with the addition of those colors, they were sorely mistaken! With the addition of six new teams, all of the sudden every color in the rainbow was represented on league jerseys. From 1942 to 1967, jerseys were either red, blue, black, gold or white.
Speaking of colors, most teams in the Original Six era used very traditional colors. Crests would become more intricately designed, and pants would shift from a neutral canvas color to a color in the team's palette. Certainly, everyone in the arena could tell a red jersey from a blue jersey - right?Īs the calendar moved into the late 1930s, solid color jerseys started taking shape. With television still decades away from being invented, there was little need to outfit teams in more than one jersey. Most early jerseys had patterns to them - whether it be barber-pole stripes or chest bands of contrasting colors. In this section, I will take you to the "Edge" and back. Teams would often buy several sweaters of the same pattern, slap a number on the back and in some cases a logo on the front and call it a day. No different than the ones you'd find at your local men's store. Very simple - in the old days of hockey, that's exactly what players wore - sweaters. Ever wonder why a hockey jersey is often referred to as a sweater?