The NHL unveiled the two jerseys for its All-Star Game today, drawing heavy inspiration from host city Nashville. The jersey draws a number of design elements from the city’s music history, with the black and white color scheme mimicking a piano’s key, to the numbering and letting designed akin to traditional country music poster lettering. The jerseys will also feature reflective material in the NHL logo, numbers and names that will glimmer when put under certain light conditions. NHL CMO & Exec VP Brian Jennings said, “Nashville has so much energy and vibrancy coming from it, and we wanted to reflect that in a way that was perhaps a little subtle but also paid homage to the city.” He added the All-Star Game is "always an opportunity for us to play around with some new technologies and design elements that can add fun aspects to things like the player intros.” With this year’s event, Jennings said the league, alongside Reebok’s design team, really wanted to reflect the host city in the jersey, while also being mindful of the game’s target audience and performance elements for players, factors that perhaps last year’s jersey for the game in Columbus focused on more. Also, as a result of the game’s format change to a 3-on-3 competition, all players will be issued both a dark and a white jersey, which they will likely switch between games as the teams advance. Jennings said that fans will have the opportunity to purchase and customize both -- the jerseys go on sale on shop.NHL.com later today, and will be in retailers tomorrow -- but he likely expects the dark jersey to sell a bit better, as most fans prefer that when it comes to buying jerseys. “We want to be mindful of SKU proliferation, but at the end of the day, we feel like we have two really strong jerseys this year,” he said.
