The AHL’s Utica Comets will pay homage to their hometown, their seventh season, and the 50th season of their parent club, the Vancouver Canucks, with specialty uniforms that they’ll wear twice in 2020. The uniforms and a commemorative logo designed by Comets VP of Creative Services Eric Kowiatek highlight the team’s Copper 7 series.

“The meaning behind it [is] that copper is the traditional 7th year anniversary gift,” Kowiatek said, “so everything would be based around the warm colors of the metal.”

The design of the uniforms evokes the Canucks famous “flying skate” jerseys, which they last wore during the 1990s, and which will reappear as throwback uniforms for three games in Vancouver this year.

“With the idea of the Copper 7 Series established, all it took was Vancouver to release their anniversary jerseys and it didn’t take much after that to see how perfect the color scheme of that jersey fit with our theme of the Copper 7 Series,” Kowiatek said. “So we reached out to Vancouver with some design ideas for their blessing.”



While the design is familiar to Canucks fans, Kowiatek worked to make it unique to Utica.

“My goal was to honor their mark but modify in a way that made it something our own,” he said. “It was a very fun project for me to work on, trying to dissect Vancouver’s Flying Skate and see what about it I could keep true to form while respectfully modifying it to modernize it and incorporate our own unique twist on it.“

The uniform set includes one element completely unique to Utica and the Comets, a logo that will serve as a sleeve patch and that will appear on merchandise.

“This was a completely custom logo showing a comet with 7 lines in the tail for the 7 years of Comets hockey flying over the Adirondack Bank Center (home of the Utica Comets) encompassed in the shape of our primary shield logo,” Kowiatek said.



The Comets will take to the ice in the Comet 7 Series uniforms February 29 and March 11.