When you’re one of the newer expansion teams in the NHL, creating a look that everyone can rally around can be tough to do. For the Nashville Predators, they’ve had a hard time warming people up to them with their sweaters and even an dalliance with a mustard yellow look hasn’t swayed their fans from revolting. Not too much anyhow.
Best: All right so the Predators don’t exactly have a timeless look to them. Everything about them since their inception has had that really modern look about them and that tends to make many old school hockey fans twitch a bit. With the team being located in Nashville, it didn’t do much to help the gut reactions by those fans to wig out over being a southern hockey team.
That said, there’s one look they’ve had that seems to meet most everyone’s approval and it’s their original road sweater. The navy blue with silver lined sleeves and the massive Predators logo on the front gave them their identity. It’s a simple look but a good one, especially for a new franchise which sometimes means they can try too hard.
Worst: As much as it pains me to say it, I’d be run out of town for not picking the Predators third sweater from 2001-2007. The mustard yellow sweaters were resoundingly hated by most fans outside of Nashville for a host of reasons. They hated the color, they hated the cartoony crest logo, and they were intimidated by the haunting saber-toothed tiger skull on the shoulders. You name it, fans had a reason to dislike it. I, personally, liked the sweater but as I’ve mentioned throughout this I have an affinity for the best of the worst too. Mustard couldn’t have been too bad since yellow is making a big comeback in Nashville this year. That said, go ahead and have fun telling Stu Grimson he looked ugly in mustard yellow, I dare you.
RBK Edge unkind: The Preds were one team that didn’t take advantage of the NHL’s switch to the RBK Edge system. When teams redesigned their look many teams used the opportunity to do something new and different. The Predators, instead, tried their best to make it look exactly like what they had originally. The one difference that happened came when their road white sweaters looked really white as they cut out most of the blue from that sweater. White and silver don’t exactly help each other stand out.
Assessment: After looking so bland since the lockout, the Predators are changing things up big time going to a brighter yellow home sweater with lots of little nuances that help make it a more original sweater. Their road whites are going to be super white again but with blue and yellow highlights throughout it to make it pop a bit more. I’ll have to see it in action to see how it plays out on the ice, but seeing a yellow home sweater has me excited. Doing things different is a good thing and yellow is really different.
