IIHF Uniform Watch

The great, the good, and the ugly

Canada, of course, in a money grub move have new sweaters for this IIHF 100th anniversary tournament they’re hosting at home. Other teams all have the same Nike template uniforms, which are all boring except for a couple of them. Luckily, all teams wore throwback jerseys from various eras, and they were mostly good.

Some retro sweaters were so good that they need to be immediately adopted as regular jerseys.

Switzerland

Germany

Italy

Slovakia

 

While others would be nice to bring it out occasionally for a change.

Czech Rep.

Russia (with the controversial CCCP)

Latvia

France

Denmark

And USA and Norway went with the Rangers look from the 60’s.

Finland’s nothing to write home about, probably just not a very pleasing colour combination.

And Slovenia went way too retro and looks like a plain practice jersey.

(Nice brown equipment, btw. Now that’s old school.)

And of course the Tre Kronor is timeless, the only way to tell apart the throwback from present day is the vertical striping on the side.

Some of the Nike Swifts are nice, but they’d be even better without the vertical stripes, especially on the socks.

Russia and Czech Rep.

Finland

Latvia

Since this is the most number of pictures evahr in a post, I’ll spare you from the other Nike Swifts which range from uninspiring to ugly, and mostly boring because they use the same template.

Good thing the throwbacks looked much better on the players than on paper.

OK, back to regularly scheduled hockey programming, the IHWC is in the Qualifying and Relegation rounds, and the Stanley Cup playoffs are in the Conference Finals.