The Flyers this morning unveiled their new uniform set. As expected, it features a return tothe “burnt orange” shade that the team wore from 1982 through 2007; in a depressing twist, it also features a jersey advertisement.
Let’s take a closer look, shall we?
The Home Uniform 
Lots of small changes here: The shade of orange is darker, the collar has changed from white to black, the sleeve numbers have changed from orange to black; the white shoulder/sleeve yoke has been widened. At first glance, it looks like the white belly stripe has been eliminated, but it’s actually been changed to black and moved to the hem of the jersey, so now it merges with the black pants. The cumulative effect is that the entire design feels darker. Personally, I prefer the old version, but it’s not a huge change either way.
The Road Uniform
Again, we see a darker shade of orange, the collar changing to black, the widening of the yoke, and the belly stripe being changed to black and lowered to the hemline. Although not visible in the comparison shot above, the sleeve numbers are remaining white but no longer have a black outline, as you can see in this rear-view comparison (which also shows how the yoke is now extended across the shoulders):
The Black Home Alternate Uniform
Unchanged except for the annoying ad for an insurance company, which is appearing on the home primary and the home alternate but not on the road uni.
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And there you have it. Here are a few additional photos:
To learn more about this uniform, look here and here.
The return to burnt orange is a welcome one, but dear God, that ad patch is ugly as shit…
Speaking of it being ugly as shit, IBX appropriately sounds a lot like IBS.
Ad patches on their own are offensive and gross. Ad patches in a completely different color than the team’s are even worse.
This is why, even though I’m against uniform ads in principle, the Goodyear and Cleveland Cliffs ads on the Cavaliers’ road uniforms never bothered me. Both used the same gold color as the uniform’s numbers and lettering, and blended in nicely with the rest of the jersey. Had they been an awful color like these, I’d have vehemently detested them.
Why oh why did they bring back the black alternates? They outlived their usefulness years ago.
Interesting that the promo shots have the old Adidas logo rather than the new one without “Adidas” below the stripes.
Presumably it doesn’t matter as they are dumping Adidas after the next season. The wordmark Adidas logo is being phased out across sports at different times so no shock they’ve stuck with it here.
I’m not going to argue the nomenclature of “burnt” orange, especially since the team itself uses the term. So if they say it’s “burnt” orange, then that’s what it is.
But I always *thought* “burnt” orange was the color the Texas Longhorns wear, which (to my eye anyway) looks more “brown” than the deeper orange/red that the team will now be using.
link
I agree. I think the old orange looks more like Texas burnt orange than the new redder orange.
Bill Putnam, one of the original members of the Flyers ownership group, was a University of Texas alum, and I think he was tasked with choosing the colors, hence the ‘burnt orange’.
Never liked the day-glo shade they have been using…glad it’s gone.
Feels like almost every change made was to make the production of the replica jerseys cheaper. That plus the addition of an ad will lead to fans paying less for jerseys, right?! /s
The Flyers are my least favorite team in hockey (and near the top of that list in all sports), so I embrace the jersey ad as another reason to dislike them.
So they’re basically doing these uniforms – link – but without the piping on the shoulders and sleeves, and with single-color sleeve numbers similar to their original uniforms – link – but… also keeping the contrasting nameplates.
I know some of you like that little quirk; it was cute when it was being used as an alternate or a Winter Classic jersey, but as a feature on a primary jersey, I just don’t like it.
Ed Snider did that a long time ago to thumb his nose at the new (at the time) league requirement for an NOB.
I believe you’re conflating this with Harold Ballard and the Maple Leafs. The mandatory NOB rule was enacted in 1977; the Flyers had by then already been using orange road nameplates with white letters.
As a Flyer fan, the only acceptable change would have been to revert to the uniform of the Tocchet, Kerr, Propp, Howe era. I was devastated when they switched and still haven’t fully recovered. These are ‘better’ but feel really lackluster and the black version is totally useless.
Though they’ve gotten enough mileage out of the Broad Street Bullies-inspired template (and the Bullies era in general), I welcome this change…something the Flyers aren’t apt to doing.
However, they won 0 Cups wearing those ’80s-00’s sweaters…not confident these will yield one either.
Likewise. That was the uniform I grew up watching when I fell in love with hockey and the Flyers. They borrowed heavily from it but the black border between the shoulder yoke and body of the jersey and the border around the numbers are conspicuous by their absence. And the contrast-color nameplates have run their course.
The road uniform reminds a lot of the road uniforms the Cincinnati Bengals wore up until a few years ago.
This is the first ad patch I’ve seen in the NHL that is truly bothersome. I’m a Bruins fan and truthfully, you barely notice our Rapid7 patch. So it really doesn’t bother me. This however, is brutal.
Maybe it’s hard to see, but is the dot in the puck on the road uni now black? Dislike.
I think it’s the lack of lighting. From zooming in it appears to match the reddish-orange, not black.
This is about the only throwback the Flyers have never done. Not that it matters; the uniforms have been largely the same as 1967.
The single-color sleeve numbers are a reminder of what the team wore back in the day when they had to hunker down on the road in Quebec and NYC for seven games when the Spectrum’s roof blew off.
Your comment kinda reinforces a point that I make from time to time:
No team has lived in the past longer than the Flyers.
You ain’t lying. I wish the Flyers would have kept the silver Art Deco logo.
No, that thing was awful. That third jersey would have been great if they removed the silver/grey trim and used the standard crest.
The headline image of the three uniforms is IMO nearly uniform perfection. And I don’t follow hockey and couldn’t tell you what the Flyers have done in 20 years. It just looks great.
Rickwood Field has been verified for Field of Dreams!
Noticeable downgrade, even if I ignore the ad patch. (Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?)
Nice to widen the sleeve yoke so that jersey numbers can stay inside, but the single layers there make it look like they got ironed on by a small shop. Plus the hem stripe, I don’t like that it disappears. It’s a part of a traditional hockey uniform!
Too similar to the old straight up throwbacks, and definitely an inferior version. It wasn’t broken, it didn’t need fixing, but they fixed the wrong things or did a bad job fixing what needed to be fixed
I will say they did actually fix one thing – the collars. Making them solid black instead of having the broken-up mishmash of black and white of the overwrought (and in this reader’s view, utterly unnecessary) Adidas “lay-flat” construction is definitely an improvement.
I hate what they did to the sleeve numbers.
Agreed…they ‘need’ the border, but at least they fit into the yoke.
Big fail, I agree.
I like how big they are, though. Isn’t that something that started in the Winter Classic where fans would be sitting further away than normal?
I guess positivity week is over.
The page on the Flyers website explains all the changes, and how they blended details from different eras into the new look. Never liked the lighter orange they used the previous years as it almost looked like Tangerine. Reminded me of the Tampa Bay Bucs creamsicle.
link
Is it just me or is the white outlining on the logo more pronounced? The prior logo looks flatter, the logo on the new jerseys looks more 3d.
Or maybe that’s just the way the photos are shot.
I guess the terra cotta color is cool, but camouflaging the belly stripe is a big no-no. Only one team draws a pass for eliminating it, and that’s the Flying-V Canucks.
The darker orange has more of a reddish look to my eye. I liked the brighter orange for the fact that it never looked like anything other than orange, even in not-very-well-lit still images or quick-hit highlight videos. That color bias of mine against the darker orange makes it hard for me to see these changes as anything other than huge downgrades, and in most of the details that’s what I see. Changing the bottom stripe to black, and moving it to the hemline: Double downgrade. Black collars: Downgrade.
On the plus side, dropping the outlines on the sleeve numbers on the home and road look to improve legibility, so that’s a notable upgrade in my book. Overall, my conclusion is that a Philadelphia team made its uniforms less attractive, and I’m OK with that.
Meh, as a Flyers fan I don’t feel any certain way about them. The last set was fine, these are fine, the ones before the last set were fine. The ad patch is just killer though. I think it’s funny how they just snuck that in there with the release of the uniforms. I guess the uniform is honoring the past, and the ad patch is looking to the future…to use the Flyers, and every other sports teams new favorite slogan.
Complete failure – don’t give the fans what they want, and try to sell it with stupid storytelling. This is a sum is less than the total of its parts situation.
Also, it doesn’t hurt to point out that IBX is the company that newly hired CEO (Dan Hilferty) used to be the head of prior to the Flyers hiring him. So much for changing their old boys network/nepo image that we’ve all grown tired of.
1. Mismatched nameplates again? I know that we cling onto it in the interest of “uniqueness”, but they always came off to me like someone plastered a piece of tape on the nameplate and wrote the player’s name on top of it.
2. The Flyers said that they took inspiration from various eras of jerseys, but IMO they didn’t make the best choices. For example, the shoulder numbers are supposed to take inspiration from the original jerseys we had in 1967, but that creates an inconsistency because while the shoulder numbers don’t have an outline, the numbers on the back still do (and I would argue that the numbers on the shoulder look better with an outline).
3. Changing the stripe on the lower half of the jersey to black and moving it to the very bottom so it blends in with the pants is another design choice I have a problem with. I know it’s supposed to take inspiration from the Lindros era uniforms, but it leaves a whole lot of empty space between the logo and the bottom of the uniform. While it’s not as bad as the Lindros era, since the logo on this new one takes up more space, the white/orange stripe was a nice touch on the old set that I felt added more visually.
4. Why would you not change the black alternate? How can you look at black numbers with a white outline on a black jersey and not see a problem with that? (IMO, I wouldn’t mind seeing the 2019 Stadium Series become an alternate, but that might be an unpopular opinion.)
5. The ad patch is horrible.
So in conclusion, it’s not the worst Flyers jersey (nothing can be as bad as the sleeve pattern at the beginning of the Reebok era), and I’m not opposed to mixing/matching from different eras, but they made the wrong choices here. But who knows, I’ll probably get used to it…
We’re also not seeing any side angles of the helmet. The Flyers have been one of the lone helmet sponsor holdouts but my guess is that’s coming to an end too.
They weren’t exactly a holdout, they did have helmet ads the first year but disappeared after that.
Correct but wasn’t that the weird Covid bubble year? Either way, it was nice to see the Flyers logo on the helmet still.
Overall not horrible, but I lot they could have done differently to make it better.
Looks like 1982 to early 2000s jerseys but not finished properly. Would have been better to just adopt that uniform again. Without contrasting nameplates and better sleeve numbers.
link
It is no secret I am disgusted with the black alternate uniform. Why is it back? If they are going to have a black alternate why can’t they design something better? We don’t need ridiculously sized Stadium Series sleeve numbers on a regular alternate.
As someone who’s rooted for Flyers since their inaugural season, I don’t really like any of these changes. This new overall design is OK — certainly could have been worse — but lots of downgrades.
They also went from solid black gloves to black with white cuffs, and remain as one of the few/only? team/s to wear a white chinstrap on their black helmets.
Flyers made the switch to white wrist roll on the gloves last season.
White chinstraps and ear loops appear to be making a comeback which I am all for. Penguins one of the teams that wear black helmets with white chinstraps/ear loops.
It just looks cheaper and less professional imo especially the sleeve number change
But it’s in Mets color
They should have taken the recent uniform and just change the tone of orange to this semi-burnt orange instead of adding all these small mistakes. The sleeve numbers fitting within the stripe is good, but omitting the outline is not. Anyway, I think that they will revert to a brighter orange very soon. Darker hues are in fashion now, but that will change if they do not sell a lot of these.
Definitely a downgrade and, yes, the black alternate has to go.
Flyers fan since early 1970s. Huge downgrade. They were already wearing their best uniform. If they had just changed back to burnt orange, that would be fine (however, too often burnt orange looks like red. I would be happier with something between last season’s orange and the classic burnt orange). Wider sleeve stripes are a downgrade. Outlined numbers on back but not on sleeves, ridiculous. Black hem is a significant downgrade. Collar fine. Contrasting nameplates are essential (but not as appealing with the wider shoulder stripes). Very disappointing.
Looks like the logo is “3d” now too. You can really tell when looking at the side-by-side comparison of the black jerseys. It has a raised white outline then a normal white outline, making the white double-thick and giving it a weird effect of having two touching white outlines that are distinct even though they’re the exact same color.