This time, we take a walk down memory lane to a time when, in my opinion, hockey got really complicated. Do you remember how much simpler hockey was before the lockout of 1994-95? Teams wore white at home and darker colours at home. The title of best player in the world pretty much boiled down to whoever played more games that year: Gretzky or Mario. There were something four or five companies, give or take a few, that manufactured hockey cards. The Montreal Canadiens actually stood a chance at winning the Stanley Cup. Good times (sigh…)

I don’t know what it is, but I just feel like the game changed for the worse after that 48-game lockout shortened season. Things got weird, man, and I mean weird! The thing that I think disgusted me the most was the sudden appearance of third jerseys all around the league. It seemed as though when the NHL calendar turned to October 1995, these monstrosities started appearing everywhere. Sure, at first there were just a few here and there, but before long, it was like the coronavirus hopped into a time machine, traveled back to the mid-1990s, latched onto these third jerseys, and multiplied to the point where there was no stopping this vile plague. These jerseys were downright awful, and there there was absolutely no reason to create them except to sell more merchandise.

Like the kid in the cafeteria who opened his mouth to show you the mashed up food he just inhaled, take a look at these!

Yes, that would be the Great One wearing what was, for a short time, a very poor excuse for an L.A. Kings jersey, the infamous “Burger King” jersey. It was also Gretzky’s last year in California. I know this isn’t true, but can’t you imagine the reason he left L.A. was because he feared having to potentially wear this thing a few more years. Methinks my little conspiracy theory makes a hell of a lot more sense than that awful Plandemic, don’t you?

That Kings uniform was bad, but take a look at this one.

Ah, yes, the time the Mighty Duck became a superhero, or something, I don’t know.

Sweet Lord, it’s a cartoon duck bursting out of the ice and brandishing what looks like a boomerang. That is WAY too busy to be on the front of ANY sports jersey. And why is the duck wearing a jersey with a picture of himself on it. Who the hell wears a shirt with their own likeness on it? How conceited are you anyway?

Also, how God-awfully atrocious is the back of that jersey! The idea of putting fancy fonts onto a player’s back was NEVER a good idea, and the person who thought of it would have his or her own spot in the Hockey Hall of Shame if I knew who they were. Uh, let’s move on…

OH….. MY….. GAWD!

WOW!

This 1996-97 jersey breaks one of the fundamental rules of jersey creation: never have more than three colours on your threads. The only exception to the rule would be if you used different shades of the same colour, like navy blue and royal blue, or light grey and dark grey. But this? Nope. We’ve got blue, black, grey, white, and orange. Nothing works here. Especially those grey streaks over and below the Lightning logo. I thought hockey was a fast sport, so why add lines to the jersey to give the illusion that you’re Batman and Robin running after the Joker?

Here’s another example of too-many-colours-spoils-the-jersey: an all-time anti-classic courtesy of the 1998-99 Phoenix Coyotes.

I like to think that the look on this guy’s face is exactly the same as when management walked into the dressing room and said, “Look boys, I’ve just invested in Lens Crafters, and to drum up business, I want youse to blind every single person sitting or playing in this arena.”

Can you believe the Coyotes wore these things for five years? Five years! That’s an entire high-school career plus one year for having goofed off a bit too much in tenth grade.

Whatever happened to uniforms like this?

And this?

Instead, by the early 2000s, just about everyone had jumped on the third jersey bandwagon. You would think that after some major missteps in the latter half of the 1990s, NHL teams would have learned their lesson, but nope.

In 2001-02, the Nashville Predators introduced “green-yellow-pea-soup-puke” to the NHL’s colour spectrum.

Eww… I guess I should say, thank you, Smashville?

Then in 2002-03, the New York Islanders thought it would be fun to dress up like road cones for Halloween, and then decided they liked the look so much, they would keep these beauties around a little longer.

In 2003-04, the Dallas Stars joined the program and unleashed this thing…

…the always-classic Texas uterus! Exactly what I think of when I think of Dallas, hockey, ice, body-checking, and slap shots.

I could go on and on here, but I think you get the point. Third jerseys have failed six ways from Sunday, and no one ever considers these to be true classics. It’s time we put the third jersey to rest forever, and luckily for all of you, they can remain locked away and forgotten within the walls of the Hockey Hall of Shame. Now let us never speak of them again.