What if All NHL Teams Wore Colored Helmets With Their White Road Uniforms?

A few clubs have already tried this. Let’s see how it would look for all 32 NHL teams.

NHL teams have traditionally worn white helmets with their white uniforms and colored helmets with their colored uniforms. This was the standard protocol back in the days when teams wore white at home, and it remained in place when the league switched to wearing colored uniforms at home in 2003. (I much prefer seeing teams wearing white at home, but that’s another topic for another day.)

Lately, though, an interesting trend has begun to take hold, as a few teams have begun to experiment with wearing their colored home helmets with their white road uniforms. The Hurricanes were the first team to try this, wearing their red helmets with their white “Canes” unis about a year ago. They’ve continued doing it for many of their road games since then. More recently, the Maple Leafs, Devils, and Sharks have all dabbled with pairing colored buckets with their white road combo. In response to that, the league is now allowing colored helmets on the road, as long as they provide enough contrast with the home team’s helmet.

I think all four of those teams’ road uniforms look better with the colored helmets, and that got me thinking: Would it work for every team? For example, what if the Wild swapped out their white road helmets for green, like this:

Not bad, right?

I decided to create that type of side-by-side comparison for every NHL team. In each case, I used a full-body photo, so we could how see the recolored helmet fits in with the entire uniform, and I used the team’s home helmet color for the reimagined road version.

I should acknowledge here that I have no Photoshop skills, so I did not create that green-helmeted Wild image shown above. It was rendered by longtime Uni Watch reader/collaborator Nic Schultz, who graciously agreed to tackle this project and created all of the colored-helmet images I’m about to show you.

One caveat, though: Nic cautioned me from the beginning that Photoshopping white things into colored things is tricky, especially for shiny objects like helmets, because it’s difficult to isolate the highlights on a white object. See how the green Wild helmet still has some glossy shine to it? In many cases, that glossy finish was impossible for Nic to maintain, so some of the Photoshopped helmets ended up looking more matte-surfaced, like this:

I think it’s still worth looking at all of the side-by-side comparisons, but in some cases you have to envision a glossy finish being added to the colored lids.

Okay, ready to take a look? Here’s how every NHL team would look with a colored road helmet, along with my thumbs-up or -down assessment for each one.