Ethan Cardona ’18
Staff Writer

     The annual NHL Winter Classic is right around the corner, set to be played on New Year’s Day between the Buffalo Sabres and the New York Rangers. The game will be played outdoors at Citi Field, the home of the New York Mets in Queens, NY, the hometown of yours truly. Both teams released the special edition jerseys they will wear for the game, along with a few new alternate logos featured in the uniforms.

     First, the “host” Buffalo Sabres. Their alternate logos include a modified version of their primary logo, with the initials “N.Y.” featured at the bottom. The Sabres also released a logo with a yellow buffalo, with “Sabres” written across the buffalo’s body.

     The jersey itself is a white jersey, with an interesting double striping across the arms and on the lower part of the jersey in blue and yellow. The main crest of the jersey is the aforementioned modernized logo with the “N.Y.” According to Chris Creamer of sportslogos.net, both the crest and the double striping are nods to the jerseys the Sabres wore between 1970 and 1996 . The shoulders are a solid blue and have the yellow buffalo on the left shoulder and the official Winter Classic logo on the right. The blue shorts also feature the Sabres’ crossed sabres.

     As for the Rangers, they were released on Black Friday after numerous teasers on social media. They introduced a new alternate logo with a silhouette of their primary crest in white, with only the initials “N.Y.” in red. They also released another version of this logo in blue and red.

     The jerseys are navy blue, a nice touch considering that the Rangers lost their navy alternates when Adidas took over the NHL jerseys this season and put all alternate jerseys on hiatus for this season. The logo is the Rangers’ iconic “Rangers” written diagonally across the jerseys identical to the ones worn in Rangers’ expansion season in 1927-28, according to Creamer. The shoulders feature the thin red stripe and two white stripes seen on the Rangers’ away jerseys. These stripes are the same pattern only thicker on the arms and bottom of the shirt. The “N.Y.” alternate logo is placed on the left chest, however the initials are replaced with a “C” or “A” for the captain and alternate captains respectively. The “N.Y.” logo is seen on the Rangers red shorts with the initials in blue instead of red.

     Overall, the jerseys are nice. They feature callbacks to older, “classic” uniforms if you will, but also include multiple new alternate logos and modernized versions of those “classic” elements. Hopefully the game itself will be as pleasant to watch as the uniforms.