For nearly three decades Martin Brodeur has heard the calls for a black New Jersey Devils jersey.
Even back in 1993, when he was a 21-year-old rookie, Brodeur remembers conversations with fans about when and if the franchise would adopt primarily black threads.
“All the time,” Brodeur said. “You’d talk to fans and they’d ask, ‘When are you guys gonna wear black?’ and as players we always thought the idea would be kind of cool, actually.”
Twenty-eight years and a Hall-of-Fame career later, Brodeur is now the primary designer of the first all-black look in Devils history, after the franchise unveiled its first alternate jersey on Tuesday morning.
“It had to be black, that was the first thing we knew,” Brodeur said. “From there everything else was on the table.”
Devils president Jake Reynolds said it has been a mantra for the entire organization, fan service of sorts, to deliver a black jersey in New Jersey.
“Other than raising a fourth Stanley Cup banner, the number one thing we’ve heard from the fan base over the years is when are we going to have a black jerseyedmonton oilers stats 2024?” Reynolds said. “When it was time to get an alternate jersey, it started and ended with that point.”
But why now?
“The idea of a third jersey has been contemplated for some time,” Reynolds said. “This particular iteration that you see here, that’s finally real, is three years in the making, but certainly an alternate uniform was contemplated years before that. The timing is right for us as a brand. The fans have really, really sort of wanted this for a long time. But more than that, I think it’s something that the players and certainly the alumni are really embracing when we’ve shown them.”
It also sets up well that the jersey will be used next season when the Devils celebrate the 40th season in New Jersey after moving from Colorado in 1982.
Introducing and designing an alternate jersey requires advance planning between the league, Adidas and the team. Brodeur and Jillian Frechette, the Devil’s senior vice-president of marketing, have been working on this jersey for three years.
Brodeur was traveling more at that point, and would text pictures of jersey ideas he saw to Frechette. He also pulled jerseys from his personal and family past, including pictures of the jersey his dad, Denis, wore for Team Canada at the 1956 Olympics.
They also worked on researching New Jersey’s hockey history, working with the Hockey Hall of Fame to find as many pictures and examples as possible of jerseys from the Newark Bulldogs, River Vale Skeeters, and Jersey Larks.
After the initial black base, two trends and ideologies started to emerge in the planning process — state pride and stripes.
While there are multiple major professional teams that play or practice in the state, the Devils are the only one that uses New Jersey in their name. Capturing that feeling on the front of the jersey became important, and that led to using the eventual script, “Jersey,” instead of the team crest, which is now on the pants for the first time in franchise history.
“People from New Jersey say they’re from Jersey. This was a nod to that,” Brodeur said. “This is the type of jersey we wanted to make for Devils fans, but also for the entire state.”
The striping also was important and pulled from elements of the historical jerseys and allowed the Devils to tell a story with stripes. For example, there are 21 stripes on the jersey, one for each county in the state; while the grouping of five stripes on the shoulder is meant to signify the Devils’ five retired jersey numbers.
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The final design was picked from “six or seven” mockups from Adidas, with the final two jersey options being tested on-ice with a couple players before making a final decision.
“That goes into the final decision,” Reynolds said. “That’s where you find what pops on the ice and what might look better in motion on a player as opposed to just hanging up.”
Per current jersey rules, any team wearing an alternate jersey has to commit to wearing it 12 to 15 times a season for three seasons. The Devils will wear the new black threads 13 times this season, 12 times at home, and once on the road in Detroit on Dec. 18.
While the Devils have used their heritage jersey, the one with green in it, on occasion and took part in the league-wide reverse retro program last season, this is the Devils’ first true alternate jersey that will be used with any regularity. It’s a notable development, since the Devils were one of the final holdouts when it came to adopting an alternate jersey after the league first formally introduced the program back in 1995 with the Anaheim Ducks, Boston Bruins, Los Angeles Kings, Pittsburgh Penguins and Vancouver Canucks serving as guinea pigs to varying degrees of success.
The Detroit Red Wings and, understandably, the Seattle Kraken are the only remaining NHL franchise to never have an official alternate jersey. Because these projects take time, Seattle has already had internal conversations about a third jersey, while Detroit will probably remain a long-term holdout as long as the Red Wings remain an Ilitch family business.
The Vegas Golden Knights, for example, didn’t wait long to introduce an alternate jersey, debuting their all-gold look last season, just their fourth season as a franchise. For the Golden Knights, it was a chance to add another jersey boost to merchandise sales just after the wave of the initial jersey was starting to slow down.
Alternate jerseys have a checkered past in the NHL. Some — like in Calgary and Pittsburgh — have been so successful they’ve become a team’s primary look, while others have been so off the wall, or simply wrong, that they’ve become laughing stocks. Who can forget the Mooterus in Dallas or the short-lived Burger King jersey in Los Angeles?
The storyline behind an alternate jersey can vary, but at the base of each fresh look is a financial and marketing question: How do we sell more merchandise and get more people talking about the team?
Depending on the franchise, the creation of a new jersey typically follows one of two paths: historical or futuristic.
When the Los Angeles Kings introduced their new white alternate jersey this season, it was a historical look-alike with a slight twist and chrome helmets on the top.
“People call it the Gretzky-era logo and we have a strong history from that, that people feel attached to,” Kings president Luc Robitaille said. “It was our chance to do that, bring it back, sell some more jerseys, and modernize it a bit.”
Alternate jerseys are usually a darker color, to stick with the current NHL setup of road teams wearing white, so the Kings jersey is unique in that regard.
“We knew the white would look better with the chrome, we built a lot about what would fit with the helmet,” Robitaille said. “We really didn’t think about the white at home thing until the end. That was kind of those ‘Oh shit,’ moments after we finished, because now we just have to make sure we are working with every team coming to town to make sure they’ve brought a dark so we can wear the whites at home.”
The Washington Capitals’ blue alternate built on the success of a jersey from the 2018 Stadium Series, taking the color but modifying the crest on the front.
“Blue has been part of the Capitals brand, but it wasn’t really a primary look on a jersey like this, which we really wanted to expand and build around that,” said Jim Van Stone, the chief commercial officer for Monumental Sports, which owns the Capitals as well as the NBA’s Wizards and ’s Mystics. “It was a chance to add some energy, create something a bit different, and find some other fan activations through a jersey.”
The Dallas Stars’ current black jersey introduced last season, with neon highlights, was partial fan service — Stars fans had been asking for a skyline jersey, and the neon is a hue that represents that — while it was also a point of being trendy and grabbing overall attention.
An alternate jersey and surrounding merchandise can be a significant revenue booster for NHL teams. Dallas’s merchandise sales are up 40 percent this season, according to team president Brad Alberts, in part due to the success and demand for the blackout jersey.
Those sales are also used by teams and the league to judge which jerseys make it past the three-year incubator period now required for each alternate jersey. In Dallas’s case, for example, some initial blowback or questioning about the neon has been replaced by favorable reviews that match up well with the ensuing sales.
Now the Devils get to enter the alternate jersey cycle of judgment for the first time in franchise history. How well it sells over the next three seasons will ultimately determine its lifespan.
(Top photo of Martin Brodeur: Courtesy of the New Jersey Devils)
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