When people ask me about the uni-verse, I always say hockey has the most interesting uniforms. For starters, every part of the player’s body except the face is covered, so there’s a lot of real estate to work with. Second, there’s the oddity of the short pants paired with the long stockings. Third, hockey doesn’t require a uni number on the front, so there’s lots of room for a visually powerful chest mark. Fourth, hockey is the only sport that routinely treats the shoulder yoke as a design element. Fifth, goalie masks and pads are a whole sub-niche of visual interest. And last but not least, hockey is the only one of the Big Four sports where the jerseys are always designed to be worn untucked, which allows for belly striping, contrast-colored hemlines, and so on.
But there have been several players over the years who prefer to wear their jersey tucked in. The prime exemplar of that style nowadays is Flyers center Trevor Zegras (shown above), who’s been tucking the back of his jersey into his pants for several years. But he may have to curtail that shirttail quirk: Zegras was called for a minor penalty for “improperly wearing the equipment” in last night’s Flyers/Bruins preseason game. The website Scouting the Refs reports that it was the first such penalty since 2013.
But it probably won’t be the last. After Zegras was penalized last night, NHL Network insider Elliotte Friedman tweeted that the call was part of a larger crackdown on equipment-related issues: