January 22, 2007
The Skinny On The New NHL Uniforms
I wasn't in Dallas today but Paul Lukas of Uni Watch was in New York last week for the super-secret preview of the Eastern and Western Conference jerseys.
There's not much here that we didn't get from USA Today last week but there are some interesting insights:
So what actually happened?
There were some introductory remarks by Gary Bettman, then some remarks by Reebok’s Matt O’Toole (who at one point said, “There’s never been a major professional sports league that’s changed all 30 teams’ uniforms en masse,” to which I immediately thought, “Yeah, and there’s probably a good reason for that”), and then a short video explaining the features of the new uniforms. After that, John-Michael Liles and the NHL’s Brian Jennings took questions from the audience. Then Liles had to leave, at which point we were all free to mingle and address questions to whoever we could corner.
What sorts of questions got asked?
Most of the other media people asked business-related questions (how much will the new jerseys retail for, that sort of thing), and I kept asking really detail-oriented questions like, “Will the Red Wings’ nameplates still have vertically arched lettering?” Afterward, I was asking one of the Reebok guys if the Blackhawks’ logo would still be chain-stitched, and Brian Jennings, who was standing nearby, looked at me and said, “Who are you anyway?” When I told him, he said, “Oh, right — that guy.”
[...]
Weren’t they supposed to show the individual team uniforms, not just the All-Star designs?
That’s what I had assumed, and of course I was disappointed when that turned out not to be the case. To be fair, nobody at the NHL ever specifically said that the new team designs would be unveiled, and many fans — myself included — were probably guilty of getting ahead of themselves in terms of their expectations. But there’s no getting around the fact that the league has been making a big fuss over the introduction of “the new uniforms,” and it’s hard to see how that fuss is justified when all they’ve shown us so far is some new fabrics, a slightly slimmer silhouette, and the All-Star designs.
So are you saying the NHL intentionally misled everyone?
No. But I think they may have botched the PR aspect of all this by sending mixed or muddled messages about what was in store.
That's not exactly a surprise. Good to see that NHL embargo was completely leak-proof. Or maybe not.
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07:23 PM