Reverse Retro: NHL looks back for league’s future with new jersey program
Posted Nov 16, 2020 04:57:00 PM.
Dan Near and his team at Adidas saw the numbers and were brainstorming about how to proceed.
The NHL had just released a survey on fans' favourite all-time jersey designs, and 22 of the top-25 were either retro or now-defunct looks.
“We sat around a table and said, 'What do we do with this?'” Near recalled. “Throwbacks had been done. We certainly didn't want to go and just do a bunch of retreads.”
Fast-forward two years and Adidas unveiled its response to that question Monday — a league-wide set of alternate “Reverse Retro” jerseys for the 2020-21 season that aim to represent the past while also refreshing designs and colours for a never-before-seen look.
Think of the new threads as modern remixes to classic songs.
“[We're] looking to innovate and create and bring something new and something cool,” Near, the senior director for hockey with Adidas, said in an interview with The Canadian Press from Portland, Ore. “A dimension that maybe brings the sport onto a pedestal it doesn't normally get.”
The release marks the first time each of the league's teams have participated in an all-encompassing launch at the same time.
Neal said design and collaboration for the jerseys, which will be worn for “multiple games” by the NHL's 31 clubs this season only, was an “enormous” undertaking.
“Something I've frankly never seen,” he said. “Typically when we do an NHL project, we meet with the team. They present us with a brief — what they see their brand looking like. It's impossible to do that for a program like this where essentially we're presenting a formula.
“Some [jersey concepts] were obvious where we got out of that first meeting and the team would be like, 'Yes, this is what we want.' And there were others where there was a lot of back and forth, a lot of: 'What do we want to represent to our fans?'”
As for Canada's seven NHL franchises, the Calgary Flames chose to pay homage to their black third jersey of the late 1990s, the Edmonton Oilers went with a remake of their design from the franchise's first NHL season in 1979 that features an “orange yoke on a white jersey” for the first time, while the Montreal Canadiens' blue threads are a nod to the record-breaking 1976-77 roster.
The Ottawa Senators, who were already going back to their classic two-dimensional centurion logo, went with a red version of the team's uniforms from their inaugural 1992-93 campaign, the Toronto Maple Leafs will don a hybrid of designs that started to appear in the late 1960s, the Vancouver Canucks are going with a new take on their third jersey from the early 2000s, and the Winnipeg Jets are combining a classic style from the original team's early years with their current colours.
