One more #BST10thYear post: Rating the regular sweaters worn by this team in 10 seasons:
(11) Tough Pumpkins On Ice, 2007-09. All credit to Dist1Ump for that line, which summed it up even better than a couple of players did. First link is to a very small picture. It ended. Only used a couple of times in 2008-09.
(10) White-and-dark-blue thirds, 2006-07. Well, it preserved the blue logo for one more year, anyway. But using it provided no consistency with the then-current branding, and besides, it kind of looked like a practice jersey. If I recall, it wound up being used for preseason games for a few years to follow.
(9) Islanders navy-blues, Edge version, 2007-09. Take a nice, classic look. Add orange in the most unlikely places. I think I dock this a few spaces just for the disappointment, because it didn’t look so bad in the lobby the year before. (Maybe that’s because it was next to the orange one.)
(8) Creamsicles (White-Star-With-All-The-Orange), 2006-08. I can’t believe I thought this was too much orange. (Granted, tigers are more orange than blue. But still.) Gets bonus points just because the team used it as a third jersey in the Tough Pumpkins era.
(7) Original blacks, 2001-04. When I see them now, they look kind of sharp and nostalgic. When I saw them night after night for three seasons, they looked, as Paul Lukas says in Uni Watch, “black for black’s sake.”
(6) Reprieve whites, technically thirds but thank goodness worn a lot, 2008-09. They should be No. 1 just for getting the Tough Pumpkins out of the picture. Rather simple, and if they didn’t follow the Edge template so closely, they might well be higher.
(5) Original whites, 2001-06. No sweater lasted longer for this team. If you were there, it brings you back, to the playoff run, to the Manchester sweep, to the 20-game unbeaten streak, to (your favorite road game during the lockout), to the turnaround game against Wilkes-Barre. Not the cleanest design; not hockey-sweaterish. But it endured.
(4) Islander navy-blues, original version, 2006-07. It was a simple design, which added to the charm. Sure, it wasn’t the old Islanders colors, but in the Big Club’s 15-year stretch in the uniform wilderness, a line I think I’m stealing from someone, this was about as good as it got.
(2 (tie)) Dynastic white and Dynastic blue, 2009-present. Simply, they’re hockey sweaters, the way they used to be (but stretchier and watertight and with manufacturer logos where logos shouldn’t be). Maybe they’re not exactly what the Islanders wore in 1980 with a Tiger on the front, but they’re close. And for that, they’re probably the nicest thing Bridgeport has ever worn.
And how nice is it nowadays to turn on a hockey game and see the Sabres in the old blue-and-gold, to see the Oilers in the orange-and-blue, and to see the Islanders in what looks right, slightly tweaked though they all be?
But even so…
(1) Blue-Star, 2003-06. …This one gets the top spot for something else, maybe something intangible, really. The team took its own nickname instead of becoming the “Connecticut Islanders” or something like that. (And as a child of the New Haven Nighthawks, that was fine by me.) It took its own colors; maybe you could consider them odd choices, but they were its own, nevertheless. The logo made me envision a blue sweater as the dark one. When the black one was unveiled in 2001, I was taken aback a little bit. But when this debuted as a third jersey on Dec. 13, 2003 (with the old-style “bubble” numbers, not the block that became standard), it looked like something they should have been wearing all along: Their own shade of the color that dominated their logo, perhaps in a design that came from the parent club but still all their own.
(Oh, yeah: Except for the bad batch to start ’05-06 with the black numbers. That was awful.)
Thanks to Andy and Christian Gardecki for checking my math.