Today, Adidas and the Detroit Red Wings unveiled their ‘Reverse Retro’ jerseys that they will wear in the upcoming 2020-2021 season. Detroit was one of the last teams to release their concept and after much anticipation, the reveal landed with a lackluster thud mixed with a wet “whoa I might’ve I shit myself” fart. I’m not exaggerating. These things SUCK.

I can say with confidence I have never seen such a creatively barren, lazy, and un-imaginative Detroit jersey design in my entire life.

It’s literally just a white jersey with a singular silver stripe on each sleeve, and one on the bottom. That’s it. These look like practice jerseys at best, and a “free first 10,000 fan giveaway” from Bell Tire at worst. Seriously, this was the best you could come up with? The idea for these jerseys throughout the league was to take a retro jersey design from the organization and twist them a bit to be a little more modern. Detroit’s was supposed to represent 1998. Please tell me what in god’s name outside of the unchanged-since-1948-Winged-Wheel-logo makes these a reversed remix whatever version of 1998? Is it because the Stanley Cup is silver and we won it that year so we get silver stripes? Is it because the championship hats given out in 1998 had silver on the brim so we got silver on the jerseys? Or did I just give the Junior Creative director who worked on this more to work with than he used on his actual pitch?

What’s with the silver? Can someone please explain that to me? The Wings have prided themselves on being one of, if not the only, professional sports teams with only two colors featured on their jersey. So why with the Winter Classic jerseys and now these, are we adding silver? What is the relevance outside of maybe the two reasons I mentioned above?

Other teams did not get this treatment. Other teams got all out effort where the Wings got diluted Winter Classics.

Now sure, the teams above had a lot more to work with. More colors, more logo and jersey history- I get it. And you may not like the ones above because they are too loud, I get that too. But you can’t deny the effort and creativity that went into the ones above. The Red Wings ones looks like someone who knows nothing about the NHL just learned how to use MyCustomJerseyMaker.net.

And while yes, the Wings are limited in their jersey and logo history, there are still a billion different directions they could have gone with this, all better than the Meijer Giveaway one they went with.

Why not attempt this direction?

Or if they had a raging hard on to keep it 90’s feeling, why not this route, which was wildly popular when the Wings were in their prime:

It’s not like this entire lineup of jerseys suck and the Wings also sucks in collection of the suck-ness. No. Most of them are pretty sick.

All jerseys can be found here: https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/31-nhl-teams-unveil-new-alternate-jerseys-photos

The only redeeming quality of this, is that Toronto got royally fucked too. Two of the greatest jerseys in hockey, and arguably professional sports, Adidas completely dropped the ball on.

God those are ass too.

I’m appalled at the lack of respect shown here. No effort. No imagination. No calls to the past. Just some shitty white jersey and some meaningless silver stripes. Thank god the Red Wings logo is the greatest in all of logo history, because it’s the only argument anyone in the world could ever have for wearing this jersey. Seriously, if you buy this jersey you either 1. buy every Red Wings jersey ever released and it’s your obligation to buy this jersey to keep your collection up to date. 2. Have no respect for the Wings uniforms. That’s it, those are the two options. Only 3rd option I’ll maybe let slide is if like Gam-Gam or your mom gets you this jersey thinking it’s cool for Xmas and you’re forced into wearing it. Now that’s it. Those three.

I need to know if the Wings had a say in this final sign off for this design. They had to have? Right? There’s no way Adidas just designed these without a member of the Wings organization green lighting them. Who let this slide? Who fucked this up? Who seriously looked at that sad excuse for a hockey sweater and said “Yep. That’s what we’re going to go with. That is what the winningest American hockey franchise in the NHL is going to proudly don for a few games in the 2020-21 season.”

Now maybe the gloves and pants they wear with them will help them out. And if you think the jerseys are “fine” it’s because you could stamp the Wings logo on a hot steaming turd and it would look cool, so yes, by virtue of the Winged Wheel being on them, they are “cool” but anything and everything surrounding that logo on that jersey is disrespectful and lazy.

Fuck you Adidas. Do better.

#lgrw 🍾

– Frank