The 70's saw a great deal of expansion, as no fewer than ten teams joined the league. The decade started out with the NHL welcoming the Buffalo Sabres and the Vancouver Canucks, and it ended with the NHL merging with the WHA, adding the Edmonton Oilers, Hartford Whalers, Quebec Nordiques and the Winnipeg Jets to the fold. Sadly, only one of those four teams -- the Oilers -- exists today.

Now, on to the uniforms...

One word that would accurately describe the uniform trends of the 1970's might be "tacky." Take the Los Angeles Kings, for example. Beginning with the 1970-71 season and lasting all the way through 78-79, they played their home games in gold jerseys and gold pants. The purpose was most likely to mimic the look of their NBA counterparts, the Los Angeles Lakers, who wore a similar motif on the court (sans padding, of course). A number of great players wore this ensemble, including Marcel Dionne, Dave Taylor and Butch Goring, pictured to the left. Unfortunately, the yellow-on-yellow, especially with a yellow helmet added on, made them look like a bunch of skating canaries. The Kings finally came to their senses in 1979 and dropped the yellow pants, wearing purple pants for both home and away games.

In 1974, the NHL welcomed the Washington Capitals and the Kansas City Scouts. Neither team did well in the standings, but the Capitals did much worse in the fashion department, wearing white pants with their red jerseys for road games, as modeled by Dave Kryskow on the right. Needless to say, that alone made the Caps the laughingstock of the NHL, never mind their eight wins that season. By the time the season had ended, the white pants were gone, replaced by blue pants that the team would eventually wear with both their home and away jerseys until their major redesign in 1995.

In the 1970-71 season, teams started experimenting with putting the players' last names on the jerseys directly above the number. The rule at that time stated that members of the home team can put the names on the jerseys, with the road team being able to do so by consent of the home team. Beginning in the 1977-78 season, all teams were required to wear surnames on the backs of jerseys, home and away. It would have been no big deal had it not been for the staunch opposition by the Toronto Maple Leafs. Unreasonably fearing a drop in scorecard sales, the Leafs rebelled and refused to put the names on the jerseys. The league office demanded that they do, so they eventually did -- they put white letters on the white jerseys and blue letters on the blue jerseys! Needless to say, the league was not at all amused, and they threatened hefty penalties against the team unless they complied. They finally gave in and put the names on the jerseys in contrasting colors.

However, the biggest fashion statement made in the 1970's came at the start of the 1978-79 season, when the Vancouver Canucks ditched their conservative blue-and-green color scheme for gold, orange and black in one of the biggest eyesores in professional sports history. The jerseys and pants were covered with V's, the biggest one plastered on the front of the jersey in place of the traditional crest. Logical thinking would suggest that all those V's stood for Vancouver, but that wasn't necessarily so. I was talking with my friend Peter McNab, who played 14 seasons in the NHL, one and a half of which was spent wearing these hideous jerseys. He was telling me that he had spoken with the San Francisco psychologist who designed the uniforms. "The V's did not stand for 'Vancouver,'" he told me. "They stood for 'victory.'" He said the idea was for the players to see the V's for victory as a way to inspire them to victory. However, it was usually the Canucks' opponents who were inspired to victory, as the Canucks didn't have a single winning season in those jerseys (although they did reach the Stanley Cup Finals in 1982, getting swept by the New York Islanders). For the 1985-86 season, those uniforms were mercifully toned down, as the big V on the front was replaced by the Canucks' crest, and four years later, gold was replaced by white as the team's primary home jersey color.

To check out which uniforms were worn in a particular season, select a season at the top from the pull-down menu.