The New Jersey Devils season ends on Tuesday night. Tom Fitzgerald's tenure is over, and the team finished with another season missing the playoffs. It was a laundry list of injuries that did them in, but looking back, there's just not a lot that excites us about the 2025-26 season.
One thing excites this author. We are finally done with the Jersey jersey. When the jersey was accidentally revealed on Twitter by a user who was sent the jersey by a manufacturer, the response was vicious. Fans panned the jersey as it sit on a hanger in some random person's bedroom. Admittedly, it looked much worse on a hanger.
However, as consumer sentiment changed and more people started to come on the side of the Devils and Martin Brodeur on this one, this is just comfortability and the look it exudes on the ice. The Jersey jersey is fine as an on-ice jersey, but it is terrible for fans.
One could add in the fact that the Devils only sold P.K. Subban jerseys when it first came out, which was two years after they traded for him and well after we were excited about Subban in New Jersey. We love him now, but two years into his Devils tenure, he was clearly a shell of his former self.
We just aren't coming around on this sweater. There are too many great options in sports to support such a miss. The marketing campaign around the jersey, which included a "Hat" hat and a "Shirt" shirt, was pretty funny, but the drops were too short, and the situation often only brought frustration for the fanbase.
The jersey itself is going to look incredibly odd when fans wear it in five years. That won't stop anyone, though. We still see Adidas Reverse Retro jerseys and some interesting throwbacks. There are plenty of red and green variations in the crowd, and we'll embrace them with open arms.
The Jersey jersey has a different feel to it. The biggest issue we have with it, and this was such an easy fix, was the fact that the Devils' logo was nowhere to be found. Brodeur and the design team was trying to pay tribute to the Newark Bulldogs, a blip on the radar of professional hockey in New Jersey that folded back in the 1920s. Even Stan Fischler likely had to find the history of the Bulldogs in his memory bank.
The Devils announced earlier this season that we were saying goodbye to the Jersey jersey this season, and we couldn't be happier. Let's try to find a jersey that's actually fun without losing what makes this logo and color scheme great.
Fans have been opining for a black jersey for literally decades. They avoided the 1990s plethora of options across the league. Some were good, and some were not. The Devils avoided being in the "not" column then, but they didn't now.
We're still on team "this one isn't good."