Next weekend, the NHL stages its first outdoor games without a crowd. NHL Outdoors at Lake Tahoe will feature four teams out in the elements, but due to the pandemic, it’ll be a television event more than anything. It was already announced that each team taking part will wear their Reverse Retro jerseys.

But what if there was more time to plan this event? Would there have been specialty jerseys? Duncan Lyle thinks so. He says: “I went for a unique aesthetic of throwback/fauxback style jersey designs, with more modern crests.”

Boston is the most direct throwback of the four, using almost an exact copy of the 1948-51 white jersey, but "reverse retro'd," if you will, into the team's original brown-and-yellow color scheme. The socks are redone to follow modern-day convention of mimicking the jersey's stripes, and the jersey uses the present-day crest design.

Philadelphia, with their limited jersey history, is a fauxback design inspired in part by their current third jersey and its use of the very wide stripe on the arm; I took it one step further and used color blocks in place of stripes as a way to include all three of the team's colors. The crest is recolored to be orange, something that doesn't seem to have ever been done before, but made sense to me on a black jersey.

Colorado's jersey is half Rockies-inspired, half state flag-inspired. The arm stripes come from the Rockies, but with an extra white stripe separating the two colors. That separation of the navy and burgundy, in turn, comes from their alternate logo, which is here used as the main crest, and of course a chest stripe behind it references the Colorado state flag. The striping pattern is used consistently throughout the uniform, but in different weights on the arms, chest, and hem.

And finally, Vegas, as the new kid on the block, is 100% "made up," but I went for a vintage look by stripping down the color palette to three, and did a hint of barber-pole on the arms and socks by repeating the stripes twice. The crest is obviously the logo's "V" with the rest stripped away, referencing the more common use of letters as crests in hockey's early days (see also, the other three jerseys in this set), but there's still no escaping the modern style to it, either. And the white beveling in the logo was the final inspiration for the jersey's striping pattern.