San Jose Has Ice?

The AHL's San Jose Barracuda are currently in one of the longest uniform set unveilings in modern history. Normally, teams will debut their home and road jerseys at the same time to help boost merchandise sales across the board, but the Barracuda have released just a specialty jersey before the new white and coloured jerseys hit the sales racks. It's hard to fathom why they would have done this, but I'm not in charge of the Sharks' AHL affilate. On Thursday, though, we finally got to see another jersey as the white jersey was unveiled, and I'm still confused why the team waited so long to unveil this look after teasing the image above on July 29.

Before we get too deep into this jersey, let's remind everyone that, back on April 28, the Barracuda invited media down to Tech CU Arena as they unveiled the first jersey in their new wardrobe. Underwhelmingly and, in this writer's opinion, abhorrently, the Barracuda introduced their "Cudas" blackout jersey to the crowd assembled. While it was reported that this jersey was going to be one of the Barracuda's primary jerseys for next season, they wisely optioned it to being their "Blackout Series" jersey instead.

With the uniform options reset, there was a chance for San Jose to do much better than the "Blackout Series" jersey, and that leads us to today where they introduced the white jersey that they'll don for the 2022-23 season.

Ok, these are infinitely better than the "Blackout Series" jersey, but we weren't exactly setting the bar high there. There are some very good things seen on this jersey, but I do have a major question that I'll pose below. Overall, though, the Barracuda are inching their way back towards looking respectable on the ice once again.

The jersey looks fairly traditional with the contrasting shoulder yoke to break up the white base colour of the jersey, and the black outline of the yoke combined with the black collar on the jersey accents the teal colour that the Sharks wear so well. I'm not a fan of the stripes on the hem or sleeves as they appear too thin really break up the white colour, and four stripes seems like one too many. The stripes, in my view, are a bit of a problem, but the Barracuda are going to roll with them.

The name and numbers are clean and crisp thanks to the contrast against the white jersey, and the font is fairly easy to read even when at a distance. I do like the teal font over the black number rather than having matching colours, but it almost feels like the number overpowers the teal name as your eyes are drawn to it first. That extra stripe seems to force the name and number to fill out of the back of the jersey, but your notice the open white space as your eyes move down. That's not good.

That's brings us to the logos seen on the chest and shoulders. The San Jose Sharks logo on the shoulder is a standard for all AHL teams as all 32 teams sport the logo of their NHL affiliate on their shoulders. As seen in the image above, the left shoulder is where the Sharks logo will reside. The right shoulder will have the primary logo of the San Jose Barracuda on it... which makes no sense. The primary logo should be on the chest where the "SJ" is, and the "SJ" secondary logo should be on the shoulder where the primary logo resides. It's almost as if the Barracuda are trying to be anything but the Barracuda by not using their primary logo to brand the team. I can't explain this thinking.

Need more confusion? Watch the introductory video for this jersey.

This jersey is officially called the "Ice" jersey in the Barracuda world, and they took inspiration from ice, snow, and polar bears. Not from the ocean or barracudas or anything else even remotely related to their team. I can see the jersey is white - why would I need inspiring to design a jersey from snow-capped mountains and white bears? How does this even relate to anything San Jose or Barracuda at all?

I'm not sure if the Sharks and Barracuda share a marketing department, but it seems like they're doing a lot of work to accomplish nothing when it comes to naming these jerseys and justifying the design of the jerseys. They can use whatever terms they like to push the jerseys, but, if you're looking for the secret to selling merchandise, the answer is make good merchandise.

The Ice jersey that the Barracuda introduced yesterday has good designs elements that bring it closer to respectability, but the weird choice of using the "SJ" logo over the primary logo combined with the off-putting thin stripes likely will have the Barracuda looking a little off this season. While this is a major improvement over the "Blackout Series" jersey, there's still a mountain to climb when it comes to designing a good jersey.

How long before these "Ice" jerseys are put on ice? Based on how often the Barracuda change their jerseys, it'll be sooner than later, I expect.

Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!