It Ain’t Easy Being Cheesy: Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins Pizza Jerseys

Pizza is a top-tier food. Hockey fans in New York get to experience the country’s best, while Chicago hockey fans deal with some weird, misunderstood concoction they think is “pizza”. Down in Pennsylvania, one minor league hockey team is becoming pizza themed for one night only.

The Wilkes-Barre/Scranton (WBS) Penguins, who are the AHL affiliate of the Pittsburgh Penguins, will become the Old Forge Pizzas for their April 1st game against the Syracuse Crunch.

The team’s official announcement says that it is doing it to honor the “uniqueness of one of our region’s most notable boroughs and culinary delights”.

If any team was going to brand themselves after pizza, you’d think it would be the Detroit Red Wings. They literally share an owner with, and their arena is named after Little Caesar’s pizza.

The Pittsburgh Penguins’ AHL affiliate will don pizza-themed jerseys.

Fans finally got a look at the special sweaters WBS will wear when they honor the magic that happens between the sauce, bread, and cheese. Gone is the normal Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins logo, which looks more intimidating than the Pittsburgh Penguins logo if you ask me.

In its place is a skating slice of pizza, with a few teeth missing, in true hockey player fashion. The “pizza skater” looks stylized like a vintage cartoon. Kind of interesting that he’s a square slice of pizza instead of the familiar triangle. Maybe it’s a Northeastern Pennsylvania thing?

After a little research, I found out that Old Forge, Pennsylvania calls itself “the pizza capital of the world”. They have their own special style of pizza where they refer to the pie as a “tray” and it is cooked in a rectangle and sliced into “cuts” not “slices”.

It’s unique and interesting, but closer to real New York-style pizza than whatever they’re eating over there in Chicago. I’ve never had it, so I can’t speak from experience, but just judging from these pictures and video, it looks better than other arena food stand pizza I’ve tried.

Speaking of triangle pizza, a cheesy triangle shows up as a shoulder patch. It may not look like a normal slice of pizza, but it is a reference to the parent team’s city’s famous nickname.

Downtown Pittsburgh is known as “the golden triangle”. Every Pittsburgh Penguins logo (though not always present on the original jerseys) since the franchise’s inception has featured an inverted triangle in reference to this. If you haven’t noticed, a pizza slice is an inverted triangle.

The shoulder patch found a way to combine that famous triangle with the one-night pizza promotion.

Something about these jerseys still looks “off”. Judging by the first pictures posted to Twitter, it almost looks fake, as if the “Old Forge pizza” logo was just photoshopped over a normal white team jersey. The fact that the logo looks a bit off-center as well doesn’t help.

Maybe that “golden pizza triangle” shoulder patch would have looked better as the main logo.

Just like pretty much every other special edition jersey, these will be available to fans to bid on in an online auction. If they ever repeat this unique promotion, maybe they should clean up that logo crest. Hopefully, they have enough pizza on hand for people who want to taste the inspiration.