The individual jerseys are fine. The program is a mess, and both of those belong to the same company.
The NHL and Fanatics dropped all 32 Hometown Remix uniforms on Monday, November 2, the first full 32-team special-edition program Fanatics has designed and developed since becoming the league's on-ice outfitter in 2024. This is the hockey version of the NBA's City Edition and MLB's City Connect, and the pitch was that every one of these was built from scratch around its city and its fans. Thirty-two creative briefs, one company, one deadline. You can see exactly where that math leads the moment you lay the collection out side by side.
It leads to black. And then more black. Edmonton, New Jersey, St. Louis and Vegas all went black. Minnesota, a team with one of the most distinct color schemes in the league, threw it away for all-black too. Ottawa went black and gold, while Columbus and Carolina drifted into grey. Nobody's published an exact count of how many of the 32 ended up dark or monochrome, but you don't need one to see it. Stand them in a row and the thing reads like a mood board someone applied unevenly across an entire league. There isn't enough contrast between many of these sweaters to tell whose city you're supposed to be feeling.
Columbus is the one that should have gotten a second set of eyes. The Blue Jackets are named for the coats worn by Union soldiers of the Civil War. The Hometown Remix answer was to put them in grey, the color most people associate with the other side. It's their first time using grey as a base, which could have been a real swing, and instead it's a history lesson that argues against itself. That's what happens when nobody sits with a design long enough.
The Bruins' brown-and-gold "Varsity Sweater," with the first gold helmets in franchise history and a brick pattern tucked into the inside hem as a nod to the Freedom Trail, is a genuinely clever piece of local storytelling turned into a jersey. Detroit's restraint drew praise for doing the simple thing well. ESPN's own ranking opened by calling some of these spectacular, and it's right. When a designer actually chased one city's story, the result sings.
So the talent and the ideas exist inside this building. Which makes the rest harder to forgive. If you can make the Bruins' sweater land, you don't get to shrug the Wild and the Devils and the Blues into the same graphite bin and call it 32 authentic identities.
Fanatics has earned every ounce of the side-eye waiting for them. This is the company players dragged over cheap-feeling MLB uniforms, where the CEO admitted, "We f---ed this up." This is the company that had to issue a public apology over Super Bowl merchandise this year. The MLB design failures traced back to Nike, but the reputation stuck, because the pattern keeps repeating: a big rollout and an uneven product, with fans paying for it. Most of these jerseys haven't even hit the ice yet. Only Florida, Chicago and San Jose wear theirs tonight, with the rest trickling out over the coming weeks, so how they actually hold up under a season is still an open question.
Judge the Bruins jersey on its own and it's a win. Judge the rollout, the one Fanatics had two years to get right, and it's a company treating 32 cities like one spreadsheet.
