Re-Imagining the NHL: Anaheim Ducks

Welcome to the “Re-Imagining The NHL” project created by Cole Jones. Cole has been great enough to allow Days of Y’Orr to post his idea on different teams with his spin on them. You can follow Cole on Twitter. Please feel free to comment on the team below. Feel free to read the official announcement of the project here. Since neither Cole or Days of Y’Orr consider this team our “home team”, we will do our best to bring in a fan of the team described to get their thoughts. Today we were lucky enough to get input from Robby and Jen from Anaheim Calling

If you haven’t checked out our other teams, visit the Re-Imagining the NHL team page. The team page will be updated daily with every team we update. So before we take a look at the uniforms, lets take a look at Cole’s comments on the Anaheim Ducks.

Cole’s comments: Tonight I tweaked the Anaheim Ducks uniforms. I was never a fan of the name “Mighty Ducks” as I thought it was a little too cutesy for grown men playing sports, so I used to pray one day they’d change their name to the Anaheim Ducks. Low and behold they finally did, but I feel they went a little too far in re-branding and made some bad choices along the way. I really like the way gold and orange look next to each other, especially with black and the little bit of silver they use. Something always seemed off about it and they didn’t look or feel like the Ducks to me. They also ditched one of the most iconic and visually interesting logos in the league. I understand why they did, but I wish they hadn’t. Since they recently brought it back in the form of a shoulder patch on their alternate jersey, I’ve decided to use it in my concept and try to tie both eras together into one cohesive identity.

My original plan was to make them purple, gold, orange, and black, but the more I played around with it, the more it annoyed me that I’d be making the Ducks and Kings wear very similar colors. Without eggplant, if I wanted to incorporate what I consider “duck colors” into this concept, I had to go with jade. The original shade of jade looked a little too jarring to be the primary uniform color, so I decided to darken the jade slightly. I paired it with the current shade of ducks metallic gold (thanks to ssur.org) and a modified (warmer) version of the yellow anaheim used on their original uniforms.

After the jump, the Anaheim Ducks…

Home:

Robby’s comments: OMG! We’re the Sharks! Help! Don’t make us choke in the playoffs!

Seriously though, I like the approach, but the green looks way to San Jose to sit well with with me. I like the idea of mixing up the main color and using something that hearkens back to the Mighty days of old, but I feel like maybe this should be a Whalers-esque green. I know that sort of compromises the link between the old and the new, but trust me. As a Ducks fan, I have to resist the urge to kill anything wearing that color.

Of the two primary jerseys, I much prefer the roads because of the way the teal (sorry, I know it’s not supposed to be that color, but that’s what I see) is minimized. I recently wrote a post advocating that the Ducks give up the wordmark and embrace the web-footed D so you definitely get full marks from me on that. Looking closer at the road jerseys, I can’t help but think that maybe the green I recommended earlier should be swapped out with a soft gold or sand. That might force you to tweak the striping patterns a bit, but I think moving silver into the existing gold areas and shifting the teal/green to a soft gold or sand would be dead on.

As for the third, I love it. It’s the exact same focus I suggested in my post and I suspect it’s only a matter of time before the Ducks reincorporate the Mighty logo with their updated color palette as a true secondary logo. That said, I think this jersey could benefit from a horizontal gold or orange stripe above the logo to off-set the shoulders (the current third jerseys actually use the very horizontal stripe that I think this is missing). Without something to break-up the black, I think the shoulder logos sort of get lost.

Overall, I like what you’ve got here, but the teal has got to go. The only thing that could be worse would be that damned winged wheel.

Jen’s comments: I’ll be honest, my very first thought when I saw the color of the home jersey was this abomination of a third jersey. That was an embarrassing moment in Mighty Ducks history. My second thought was one much similar to Robby’s – I had to suppress the vomit rising in the my throat. Any shade of teal, even if it’s more on the green side, is the devil’s color. I know that the teal-green shade was part of the Mighty Ducks original jerseys, and so was eggplant (a shade similar to the Kings royal purple), but that doesn’t make us want to wear either.  As the team developed into a legitimate winner, our rivalries with the Sharks and Kings have become downright nasty. Since this is a Boston blog, think of it this way: the Ducks donning teal (or purple, again) would be like the Red Sox adding pinstripes to their uniforms. Unthinkable.

I’ve lived in South Orange County – home of the infamous Housewives – for the past 15-ish years. One of the struggles the Ducks, mighty and not, is selling jerseys to this very picky fanbase.  White, one of our current jersey colors, is a distant second in sales to our two current black jerseys. As ridiculous as it sounds, our fanbase is remarkably color conscious, even if they don’t want to admit it.  The Ducks drastically changing their colors was the visual representation of the new ownership and agenda. If truculence were a color, it would be on the jersey. I think that’s why there was so much resistance (by the organization) until this prior season to include the old Mighty Ducks logo on anything.

Personally, I am not a fan of the MD logo. Maybe its the years of abuse I’ve taken for being a team named after a Disney movie. I’m ok with the small shoulder patches with the old logo and that’s about it. To prominently place the MD logo on the front of the third jersey takes me back to a dark place of clapping cartoon hands on the jumbotron whenever there was a fight on the ice. I am happy to see the webbed D taking the place of the wordmark, though. There is so much space on the front of the jersey, and the Ducks missed the boat by originally re-branding themselves by using the wordmark instead of a symbol. Putting the webbed D on the two primary jerseys was a great touch.

In a way, I was a little let down by the re-designed jerseys. I wanted to see something completely out of the box different, like a black third jersey with the Mighty Ducks logo that has red eyes. At least that makes the Disney logo look somewhat tough (if that’s even possible).

Days of Y’Orr’s comments: Okay, before I rub my hands all over this like a 13 year old exploring himself, I have to admit that the inclusion of the Mighty Duck logo makes my pants twitch. The Mighty Duck logo should be loved by all as it brings us back to a simpler time in life. A time when all we cared about was knucklepucks and Julie “The Cat” Gaffney’s brick wall of a glove side. When we walked up and down the halls at school and screamed “WOO WOO KENNY WU!” in such a gleeful tone. From the mysterious disappearance of Jesse Hall’s younger brother Terry to the “mighty” come back against the beach ball popping coach of Team Iceland this logo brought out the best in us. It brought out the best in America. Maybe if Obama and those dickfaces in Washington wore more Mighty Duck logo’d apparel, our debt would be paid off and jobs would be plentiful.

Okay, now that’s out of my system I have to say that I hate the jade color of the home jersey. There’s something about it that I can’t get past. No idea what it is but no thanks. Also, I’d replace the gold piping with the current orange that the Ducks use. I do like the striping used because its a nod to the first jerseys used in Anaheim.

With that said, I love the third jersey. It may be more because of the logo, but that logo is fucking awesome. The reason the logo didn’t work? Disney absolutely raped the shit out of it and put it everywhere. A shitty third installment (which has Emilio Estevez in a lead role and he was there for what? 10 minutes? It’s fucking bullshit. All he does is show up towards the end and give Charlie the Care Bear stare before they play the Varisty team.) And here’s another thing that bothers the piss out of me about that movie. The USA team that won gold can’t beat a fucking Varisty team? They can beat Iceland, who had kids older than Danny Almonte in the Little League World Series, but they can’t beat a bunch of high school kids until it’s the end? AWFUL.

So not only did Disney produce one of the worst hockey movies after two of the greatest outside of Slap Shot and Sudden Death but they also made it into a TV show. So yeah, maybe no one took the logo seriously because Disney did all it could to make it a link to children. I have an idea Disney, if you’re going to put a hockey team in California, stop being pedophiles and trying to get children to jump on your shit. I’m glad Anaheim started bringing back their old logo. I fucking love it.