Middle Of The Pack

As you can see to the left, the Tampa Bay Lightning rolled out their new logo and jerseys today. While I'm not overly thrilled with the new jerseys, they certainly aren't bad. The logo feels a little too simplistic for me, but it appears that the majority of the teams are cutting down on the thread counts in their logos. As we see more and more jerseys rolled out, it appears that teams are being grouped together in terms of their designs: Original Six are traditional jersey designs, while the first expansion teams in Ottawa and Tampa Bay have templates that are somewhat similar. In any case, here's are Tampa Bay's new jerseys.

Tampa Bay decided to change their primary logo. The old logo had an unfinished circle in it, and the two different fonts were questionable. Also, the Lightning had a bolt of lightning on their logo, and the word "Lightning" beside it as an example of redundancy. The Lightning's updated primary logo now looks like this. Not a huge improvement, but at least the redundancy is gone.

In looking at the jerseys, I'm not overly fond of the new looks. The white road jersey looks far too white. It's almost like one of those ridiculous pink fashion jerseys. Missing are the shoulder yokes that the Lightning used to wear, and the contrasting colours of the yokes made the jersey look much less plain than these new ones. The home jerseys suffer the same fate as the road jerseys in that they're missing the shoulder yokes as well.

The missing stripes on the jersey hemlines give the new blank jerseys a very empty feeling if it has no name or number on the reverse. The home jersey does nothing to help this problem either. As can be seen, the Lightning's font will continued to be used. The questionable move is on the front of the jerseys. Why are there only numbers on the front of the road jerseys? Is this like Nashville's placement of the word "Nashville" on the front of their road jerseys? The uniforms are supposed to be UNIFORM. Isn't that the whole idea?

One thing that the Lightning did keep from their previous look was the armpit striping that made their jerseys unique before. Despite the jerseys being a template for all 30 NHL teams, it's nice to see some of the NHL teams keeping with what made their jerseys unique in the first place.

I am happy that the Lightning broke free from copying their Florida cousins, the Panthers, in not having piping on their jersey. The apron look would have been ridiculous on the white jerseys, not unlike the Predators look.

The Lightning end up somewhere in the middle of the pack with these jerseys. Not overly great, but certainly not Islanders or Kings bad.

Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!