The Coyotes will wear their original black Kachina-style jerseys on Friday night when they host the Calgary Flames at Gila River Arena on Throwblack Night.





It will be the second time the team has donned its original black sweaters for a game since changing the logo and uniforms in 2003-04. On March 5 of last season, captain Shane Doan and teammates defeated the Vancouver Canucks, 3-2, to cap a fun evening of nostalgia for the team and the fans.

“I loved it and I’m so glad we’re doing it again,” defenseman Michael Stone said. “It created lots of excitement and we played a good game that night. Plus it’s extra cool for me because I was a kid living in Winnipeg when the team moved to Arizona, and I grew up with that logo and still like it.”

Defenseman Connor Murphy also can’t wait to again take the ice in the throwback uniform.

“It was an awesome experience,” Murphy said of last year’s game. “I wish we got to wear those jerseys more. They look unbelievable and obviously the fans like them. I remember seeing lots of the old-style jerseys in the crowd that night.”

Doan, the only member of the current Coyotes to wear the original jersey before last season, said last year’s game – and the festivities surrounding it – was a blast.









“It was fun to see the guys in those jerseys and it brought back a lot of good memories for me,” Doan said. “I remember seeing Tobi Rieder skating around in warm-ups in that No. 8 jersey and thinking it was Danny Briere. And I think it was fun for the younger guys who had no connection to it. That’s a jersey they saw growing up and it’s one that stood out because it was so different from other jerseys at the time. You could tell they really enjoyed wearing it.”

The team’s original logo, created by the Phoenix-based graphic design firm Campbell Fisher Ditko, was unlike any NHL logo in its concept and its intricacies. It depicted a Kachina-style coyote standing upright with a hockey stick; the most striking feature was the mask drawn in Southwestern style to show off the team’s new colors: forest green, brick red, sand, sienna and purple.

“It was an exciting design but it was certainly not a traditional hockey presentation,” said David Haney, who served as Creative Director for the NHL at the time. “It was hockey as interpreted with a Southwest feeling and the result was most intriguing. All of those different elements within that interpretation of the coyote on the skates with the stick were just fascinating to look at. It was a very complex logo, which was a good thing because it was giving you the opportunity to see something new every time you looked at it. Perhaps that’s why fans who fondly recall the logo gravitated to it. It was very engaging.”