This week marks 25 years since the Edmonton Oilers first skated out in their original third jersey, a look that arrived with a splash on Oct. 27, 2001, in a 3-2 win over the Vancouver Canucks at Skyreach Centre.
The sweater had actually been unveiled a day earlier, with captain Jason Smith fronting the reveal alongside alternate captains Mike Grier, Rem Murray, and Ryan Smyth. And from the jump, it was clear this was something different. Todd McFarlane, the comic book artist and writer who designed it, took the Oilers in a direction they had never gone since joining the NHL in 1979.
The jersey came with two new logos: a comet-like oil drop on the chest and a secondary “Oilers” mark on the shoulders. It also introduced dark navy and silver into the team’s look. Even with that futuristic feel, McFarlane gave it a classic twist with a lace-up collar.
Edmonton had been one of the last NHL clubs to adopt a third jersey, but by the late 1990s the alternate-sweater craze had already produced some of the league’s most talked-about designs, including the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim “Wild Wing” and the Los Angeles Kings “Burger King” jerseys. Before the Oilers got into that game, they had effectively cycled through four jersey designs across their first 22 NHL seasons: the original home and road set from 1979 to 1996, then the updated home and road versions introduced in 1996. Both pairs featured the same primary logo and similar striping, with the colors shifting from blue and orange to midnight blue and bronze.
McFarlane, who was part of the Edmonton Investors Group that bought the Oilers three years earlier, worked on the design with his art director Brent Ashe. The finished product was bold, strange, and a perfect fit for the man behind Spawn.
Fans embraced it right away. Once the jerseys hit the shelves, hundreds of people lined up at the team stores around Edmonton to get one.
More than 2,000 were expected to sell in the first weekend alone, an eye-popping number for an era before online retail was everywhere. Darrell Holowaychuk, the Oilers’ vice-president of properties, said one retail location had done a third of its Christmas sales in one hour.
The look wasn’t just a hit in the store. Edmonton posted a 64.3% point percentage in the McFarlane jersey during the 2001-02 season, going 8-4-1-1. In its regular uniforms that year, the club’s point percentage sat at 54.4%, with a 30-24-11-3 record.
The jersey stuck around longer than many third sweaters do. Some disappear almost immediately, but Edmonton wore this one through the 2006-07 season.
It didn’t leave because the Oilers wanted it gone. The NHL paused third jerseys altogether for 2007-08 when every team moved to the Reebok Edge sweaters.
When third jerseys returned in 2008-09, Edmonton did not revive the “Oil Drop.” Instead, the club brought back its original road sweater design as the new alternate.
One possible reason is that the McFarlane look may not have suited the tighter Reebok Edge cut. Only two NHL teams in 2008-09 brought back the same third jersey they had worn in 2006-07.
In the seasons that followed, the Oilers rotated through a few alternate jerseys, all of them essentially spins on the standard design with the colors swapped around.
The original “Oil Drop” design did return in modernized form during the NHL’s Reverse Retro program in 2022-23. Edmonton’s first Reverse Retro jersey in 2020 was based on the team’s inaugural NHL look, but the later version leaned into the old third jersey. It stayed close to the original, with orange added to the logos and striping as the main change.
The Oilers wore that Reverse Retro version only five times in 2022-23, and they won just once. The NHL did not continue the Reverse Retro program, and the jersey vanished again.
Even now, at Rogers Place, you can still spot a few “Oil Drop” Reverse Retro jerseys in the stands, along with a range of other Oilers sweaters. In the last three years alone, the team has added two more to its wardrobe: the one-game jersey worn for the 2023 Heritage Classic and its current alternate, now in its second season, which is also a major break from the club’s past looks.
Another jersey is coming soon through the league-wide Hometown Remix program. The NHL calls it a “special edition uniform that “uniquely and authentically celebrate the fans, city, and local culture of each team.”
Nothing has been officially unveiled yet, though designs have leaked. Edmonton’s is reportedly black with orange accents, and the early reaction has been mixed at best.
For all the new looks, the McFarlane jersey remains the one that still has a hold on Oilers fans. It sits in mothballs, but the appetite for it clearly hasn’t gone away.
The team could bring it back whenever it wants, and the response would likely be huge. Whether that ever happens is another story.
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Tomkins is not arriving as a total unknown, either. He has previous NHL experience and only recently signed a two-year, two-way contract with Edmonton, giving the organization a bit of familiarity with him before this opportunity came up. For the Oilers, the immediate question is how the crease holds up in a spot that was not part of the original plan. [Read more 🡒]