Most of us celebrated the new year just a few weeks ago. “Lunar New Year” is still on the horizon for January 29th. “Lunar New Year” is commonly known as “Chinese New Year” even though it is celebrated by many different Asian cultures. Unlike “regular” New Year’s that’s always on the fixed date of January 1st the date of lunar New Year varies every year.
Lunar New Year has also become a popular event for NHL teams to wear special edition jerseys. SportsNet made a nice Instagram post about the various jerseys from a few seasons ago you can look back on here. This season the San Jose Sharks and the San Diego Gulls, AHL affiliate of the Anaheim Ducks, are early contenders for best Lunar New Year special edition designs.
The Sharks will celebrate Lunar New Year during their January 25th game against the Florida Panthers. Fans will receive a beanie with a Sharks themed Lunar New Year logo. San Jose based artist Eric Bui designed the logo, a variant on the regular Sharks logo but swapping out the traditional triangle behind the shark to a red Asian design, adorned with Asian patters and lanterns. The traditional “Shark” is there but with a much more Asian art influenced design. In lieu of biting a hockey stick, he’s biting a red festive banner.
The Shark’s press release also features a secondary logo of the Asian design shark in a more slivery “S” shape around a red hockey stick. 2025 is the year of the snake, so that is probably what the Shark/snake hybrid is reference to. Cool design, but our one critique is that if we see something hockey themed with a blue “S’ we immediately think of the Seattle Kraken logo.
The Sharks haven’t specifically mentioned if the team will wear the Lunar New Year design as a crest on their jerseys, but we sure hope so. The team also announced Sarah Pham, an area tattoo artist who designed last year’s San Jose sharks Lunar New Year logo, will reveal a public art installation. There will be other activations and appearances at Saturday’s game as a part of the celebration.
Over on the AHL side the San Diego Gulls held their Lunar New Year’s celebration on Saturday against the Calgary Wranglers. They wore a special jersey based off their white road jerseys and unlike most NHL special jerseys, there were worn for the entire game. The traditional Gulls logo still features the same “Gulliver mascot”, but with a red background and “San Diego” spelled out in Asian characters. The hockey stick “Gulliver” usually holds is replaced by a red hockey stick that turns into a menacing looking snake. Chinese lanterns and Chinese good luck coins take the place of shoulder patches.
Red with outlining in gold completes the jersey. While not fully shown off in the pictures the team posted, it appears that some sort of Chinese or Asian script or design will be down the sides of the jersey under the arms. According to the Gulls Facebook post the jerseys will be available for fans to order online.