TXHT Jersey Share – All Star Vice Vibes – The Xperience Hockey Talk

Ladies and gentlemen welcome to another edition of TXHT Jersey Share where today we take a look at the 2023 NHL All Star jersey for Eastern Conference All Star, and Washington Capitals forward, Alex Ovechkin courtesy of Cool Hockey.

For the 2023 NHL All Star Game the Florida Panthers would play host, and with this season also doing the Reverse Retro program, the All Star Game would act as the final game to introduce new jerseys to the program. Going all the way back to the epic jerseys from 1994-97, the All Star jerseys go back to the glory days of the mid 90’s of when the All Star Weekend was at its best. For the Reverse Retro program they would go with the classic star jersey, but instead of the Purple (West) and Green/Teal (East) dominant jerseys, they would go with Black (technically East) and White (technically West) for the dominant colors. For the secondary colors they would use Biscayne Blue and Flamingo Pink to give the jerseys a South Beach feel to it.

Now of course with that said, we got address the elephant in the room as there are those that claim these are horrible because they are so called “woke”, and boy those people are wrong. The point of the colors is to celebrate the locale that the All Star Weekend took place in, and the colors do give a Miami Vice vibe to them, which was the point of choosing the colors. Plus the Miami Heat of the NBA did multiple jerseys that utilized these same colors, and everybody applauded them for it, yet when the NHL did it for the All Star Game it’s “woke”? That doesn’t fly at all. It’s one thing to say you’re not a fan of something, but it’s another thing to claim something that isn’t true for the reason to not like something.

With all that said, let’s talk about the jersey now. I got myself the Eastern Conference jersey and I got mine customized to be Alex Ovechkin, and for obvious reasons. I do want to say that there are a couple things I would like to nitpick, but these things aren’t really on Cool Hockey, but more on Adidas and the NHL. For one, for as pretty as the jersey is, having iron on patches for the player numbers was a tad undesirable. Cool Hockey is known for their amazing stitched jerseys, and it feels like Adidas and the League put them in a spot where they couldn’t do that for these jerseys. The nameplate is sewn on, as are the event and team patches on the shoulders. However, for both of the shoulder patches they are more like the shoulder patches that Adidas used when they first started doing the jerseys in 2017-18, and not the real quality patches they use on the PrimeGreen jerseys today. Which feels like a bit of a letdown. Also, and this is just something I would to have love to have seen, but if you were going to do the Reverse Retro jerseys for the All Star Weekend, it would have been a lot cooler if they had used the team’s respective Reverse Retro logos instead of their actual ones. Would have made things more special for the jersey and to celebrate the Reverse Retro program too.