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Best and worst sweaters of all-time: San Jose Sharks

Jeff Friesen

It’s not easy wearing teal but the San Jose Sharks have made it look good for over 20 seasons in the NHL. Of course, sometimes teal doesn’t always look so nice and when you’re perpetually coming up short of the Stanley Cup that stings a bit. Regardless, the Sharks stick with it through good and bad and look good while doing so.

Best: Ahh the Sharks. Forever in teal since their inception (hey, everyone needed a team in teal) and always with a menacing shark adorning their sweaters. Chances are you either love the design and the look or you hate it. As for me, my favorite remains the original road teal sweater. It’s the one they wore during their crowning moment as a franchise in beating the Detroit Red Wings in 1994 and it’s forever etched into everyone’s memory thanks to Arturs Irbe and Jamie Baker. Love teal or hate it, it set the tone for how to embrace such an odd sports color.

Worst: That said, sometimes teal is a bad thing and when the Sharks updated their look to make it look a bit more modern, it turned the classic road teal sweater into a teal, black, and gray clusterbomb of color. Sure the shark on the front stayed the same, but the dorsal fin patch that looked so good on the original sweater was gone and the font on the numbers and letters was switched up to make names look muddled on the back. Messing with a good thing is wrong. Making Owen Nolan look bad is never a good thing.

Embracing orange: Oddly enough, when the Sharks redid their look with the RBK Edge system sweaters, they added a color to help make things pop. Out went the gray and in came the hint of orange. By adding orange to their look and numbers to the front of the sweater along with a tweaked out new-ish logo, the Sharks were able to make something virtually brand new and old-school looking. The love for orange was official when fans were given orange rally towels during the playoffs last season. Respect earned.

Assessment: The Sharks current sweaters are nice. Well, except for the overly dull “BlackArmor” third sweater that sucks all the color and life out of their look. Being ashamed of who you are (and that’s a team whose main color is still teal) doesn’t invoke any sort pride at all. If you want to find something silly and nonsensical to blame the Sharks playoff loss to Vancouver on last season, blame it on the BlackArmor. If the Sharks did away with that, they’d be sitting pretty.