This is pulling from old memory so I may have some details wrong, but:
I believe the design actually started with the athletic purpose of the jersey, and the determination that a traditional hockey sweater’s seams weren’t ideal for athletic movement. If you look at where the seams go in the Edge template, they’re in ergonomic places to accommodate the twisting and stretching that happens during a hockey game.
That template in and of itself created issues, because traditional hockey jerseys usually have straight lines over the shoulders (either that, or no lines at all). So for example, St Louis relied heavily on the visual effect of straight lines running from collar to shoulder, and this was no longer practical from a production standpoint:
So that production problem got passed along to the design teams for a solution, which is where things
really went off the rails. Having been given license to follow the new template, they set about the creation of a new visual profile for the NHL. Of course this was basically a license to force new jersey sales leaguewide, so it’s not like the league was pushing back on them.
So from the jersey above, you get the Edge-ified Blues:
Of course, they made up some marketing BS about this being a tribute to the Arch, but it was a straightforward matter of needing the shoulder stripes to follow the curving seams near the collar.
BUT, it got even dumber. Because again — production problem without a good design solution. Look at Oshie’s jersey above, if he gains the captaincy where do you put a letter?
Well…
So from what started as a simple matter of trying to make the jerseys less bulky and restrictive, we ended up in the theater of the absurd from a design standpoint. Nobody in their right mind would deliberately set out to create the visual mess you see in that last picture, but the train had left the station from an engineering standpoint.
Some teams had it a lot worse than others. Florida went from this:
To this:
And Calgary went from this:
To this:
And maybe the worst of all, poor Colorado going from this:
To this:
So in short, they came up with a solution for something that wasn’t really a problem… painted themselves into a corner where form and function could no longer co-exist… and ended up torching the visual identity of the league for a while.