Thank goodness the Dallas Stars went green again

Yesterday was St. Patrick's Day, and while this holiday is not really observed in my parts of the world, the NHL has a strange relationship with it. Every year the NHL carts out a bunch of merchandise that features some strange variations of player's names like "O'Vechkin" in a gaudy attempt to allude to a fake Irish heritage. The merchandise is also almost exclusively green, which is very very strange to me as hardly any team actually uses the color and it is very jarring to me when a teams logo is rendered into a color that is not associated with that franchise.

However, this also points at a certain situation: Green is a very under-appreciated color North American pro sports. There are plenty of teams wearing a shade of red or blue (or both) as their primary colors, but in the four major sports leagues there are only a handful of teams which use green as their primary color. There are the Boston Celtics and the Milwaukee Bucks in the NBA, the Oakland Athletics in MLB, and the Green Bay Packers, New York Jets and Philadelphia Eagles in the NFL, but other than that not much comes to mind. Of 92 franchises in those three leagues only six use green as their primary color. Seven if you count the Miami Dolphins (which I don't). And until recently in the NHL green was almost completely absent.

Take the uniforms from 2007-08 for example. Not a single primarily green uniform anywhere. Even teams like the Dallas Stars who have green as one of their primary colors opt for instead the super-safe black jersey option, which is supposed to be more marketable. Their green, their proprietary color, is relegated to an accent as if it is offensive to the eye.

If you black out the logos, there isn't any green in this picture at all.

To me that was a very sad state of affairs. Teams appeared to blend into one another and did not even attempt to carve out an identity of their own. The Oilers for example opted for a more timid copper instead of a more vibrant orange. The Flyers were also a similar case, though they used more orange on their uniforms. Even the San Jose Sharks felt the need of introducing a black jersey for some godforsaken reason, though at least they never relegated their traditional teal to an accent color.

Rather than using their primary colors, teams shewed away for them, attempting to appear more hip and more urban. But then the revolution came and thank goodness for that. While some teams like Boston opted to introduce a 2nd black uniform and the Kings actually put away the purple for some unknown reason, the Flyers brought back their original orange Uniforms, and what a welcome sight that was. The Oilers also went back into the closet and brought back the Gretzky era orange. However, the biggest step forward in terms of uniform came last year when the Dallas Stars introduced their new uniforms for a new era.

At first I was skeptical because the first thing I saw was the shoulder patch logo. I am not a fan of rings around logos spelling out the name and city of the team. However, I am very happy with the final design they chose. The sweaters grow on me every time I see them as they are clean, but most importantly they are unique. The Stars have their identity back, and it is green.

So far the Stars are the only green team in the NHL, but there are two other teams that have that option: The Minnesota Wild and the Vancouver Canucks. The Canucks will be less likely to make a switch. They have a long and horrifying history with uniforms, involving the largest V-Neck possible, laser spaghetti and tie-dye before settling into a traditional uniform using blue as a primary and green as an accent, giving them an actually decent look.

I have big hopes for the Minnesota Wild though. While they still cling to the christmas-tree like red jerseys, their green secondary uniform is in my opinion the future of that franchise. Given that they use Green and Beige while the Stars use Green and Black, there shouldn't be too much of an overlap as well. The only thing they have to do is get rid of the word-mark and put their great logo on front instead. At worst we at least have a second team using a green sweater on occasion.

The Stars have finally found back to the right path in actually having an identity of their own and add to the color spectrum used in the NHL through it. I only wish the Los Angeles Kings would do the same and return to using purple, though I fear this is never going to happen. A large swath of Kings fans were gained through their 2012 Cup Win and they have no association between the color and that franchise, and that is a shame in my opinion.