Bruins, Penguins Reveal Logos for 2023 Winter Classic at Fenway

The National Hockey League has unveiled the logos (and just the logos) that the Pittsburgh Penguins and Boston Bruins will use when they head outdoors at Fenway Park in Boston for the 2023 Winter Classic on Monday, January 2, 2023.

First, the host Boston Bruins, who will be going with a combination of two logos from very different eras:

The Bruins 2023 Winter Classic logo shows “BOSTON” in black arched over a stylized bear/bruin head in yellow and black, the mouth open, exposing the bear’s teeth and tongue.

This design takes the “B” from the Bruins’ original “spoked-B” logo from the 1948-49 season, originally created as an anniversary logo celebrating the club’s 25th year in the NHL and worn on the front of their white uniform for just the one year (it was later recycled for the Bruins appearance in the 2010 Winter Classic). A new, custom typeface inspired by this “B” was created to finish off the city name.

Below the “BOSTON” portion of the logo is the bear head that had been worn as a shoulder patch on the Bruins’ home and road sweaters from 1976 through 1995. Brought back most recently on the team’s yellow Reverse Retro jersey in 2021. The NHL says the “arched form of the wordmark is a subtle nod to New England amateur hockey”.

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The visiting Pittsburgh Penguins will be counter by tapping into the early days of the NHL’s history in the City of Pittsburgh:

The Penguins 2023 Winter Classic logo shows a stylized, italic block “P” in black, gold, and beige. This is based on the sweaters of the Pittsburgh Pirates, worn from 1925 through 1928. The Pirates were the NHL’s first team based out of Pennsylvania and though they used the same name as the baseball club, the NHL’s Pirates beat baseball’s Pirates to the punch by wearing a black and gold colour scheme more than two decades earlier.

Speaking of colour schemes, here’s a fun story…

When the Pittsburgh Penguins first changed their colours from blue and white to black and gold in 1980, the Boston Bruins challenged it saying their club should be the only one to wear those colours in the NHL. The Penguins responded by pointing out their hockey Pirates were actually the first team in the league’s history to wear black and gold, doing so at a time when the Bruins were still wearing brown and gold. Forty-three years later, the two clubs get to settle the score on the ice, with the Penguins wearing Pirates-themed uniforms for the first time in their franchise history.

Uniforms for these two clubs will be unveiled later this month; we can expect to see those for the first time (officially, anyways) on Friday, November 25, 2022. Based only on the matchup graphics for the game, I’m predicting the Penguins in beige and the Bruins in black.