A week after releasing their new logo, the Los Angeles Kings introduced the team’s new home and away uniforms.
It’s basically what the Kings wore back in the 1990s — they’ll be in black at home with large white and silver striping and in white on the road with black and silver. The striping style is the same on both jerseys, a consistency the Kings had been missing since 2011. The stripes are pretty large, especially around the waist of the jersey; this same striping is also worn on each of the socks.
This set does not include a third jersey, as NHL teams typically do not get an alternate uniform in the first year of a new uniform design.
The silver striping, crest, and numbers all sparkle, similar to what we see on the Vegas Golden Knights’ gold home uniform.
Player numbers are now above the stripes, near the shoulders, marking a difference from this set’s original run, which placed them within the stripes themselves. The crest on the front of the sweaters is also notably larger than before. On the road whites, the player’s name is in single-colour black with a black number trimmed in silver and black. At home, the names are sparkly silver with a silver number trimmed in black and white.
The black home uniform is paired with a new matte black helmet, marking the first time an NHL team has used a matte black helmet full-time. The white away uniform includes the same white helmet as last season. The shiny silver “chrome dome” from last year has been banished.
There’s not much else to say about these. Though I’ll add that it’s quite nice to see the Kings move on from the obnoxious sleeve piping that they had been hanging onto since the Reebok days (Washington Capitals, take note).
Late last week, the Kings unveiled the new logo that we see on the chest of these new uniforms. Like the uniforms, the logo is a throwback, again mostly, to what the club wore from 1988 to 1998, the so-called “Chevrolet Logo” (sorry, it’ll always be the “Gretzky logo” to me), with some noticeable updates throughout. The typeface for both the “LOS ANGELES” and “KINGS” have been changed, the crown at the bottom has been replaced with the sweater crest of the original 1967 Kings, and the shape of the logo itself is now more vertical with less of an angle on either side.
“When we dropped the 90’s heritage jersey that we were going to wear on the ice for the first time in a long time, and we unveiled that really cool video that went out, and it was wildly popular by the fans that it was going to come back, and then COVID happened, put a complete pause on it, but we saw the popularity and demand for that brand and jersey,” Los Angeles Kings’ COO Kelly Cheeseman told the team’s own podcast “Then, during that period, we transitioned into a new merchandise direction and look and feel and the fans spoke and the players were wildly excited about wearing that jersey.”
“When you go back to the early crown, it was always multicolour, so the first thing you’ve got to do is break that down to one colour and by doing that, it just presents a whole new landscape of what we call colour problems,” Andy Cruz from House Industries, the company that worked on the rebranding, shared with the podcast. “Not colour like multiple colours, but like when you look at something black and white, there’s a density to how much black and how much white there is, and that’s what we use to start to measure, okay, if it goes big, it goes small, should there be more jewels, less jewels, is it getting bunched up, loosen it up, so that was the real colour issue that we had.”
The overall brand family for the new Kings logo includes that primary that we’ve already seen, a version to be used on a dark background which includes an inverse of the outlines (a thin black followed by a thicker white rather than the white to black). The new alternate/secondary logo is the updated 1967 sweater crown that is also used within the primary logo, and finally, a series of three new wordmark logos, the same typeface as the primary logo, but with a neat little nod to descending “K” that was used on the original KINGS logo (see below):
The Kings will present their new jersey to their NHL Draft picks this weekend in Las Vegas; they’ll then debut when the club takes the ice for the preseason in September.
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