It’s official: Penguins announce return of “RoboPenguin” jersey for this season

Over the summer the news that the Penguins were bringing back a version of their “Robo Penguin” logo as an alternate jersey got tipped by the NHL’s own website (whoops!) but the news is now official.

After teases yesterday from across the league with all the teams coordinated efforts to announce this year’s “reverse retro” jersey, the Penguins and adidas have finally formally revealed the design.

As the reverse retro this will be the fourth different jersey the Penguins have this season. There is the base black home jersey, the white away jersey, and the black PITTSBURGH (known as the Snoop Dogg jersey) that they wore last year returning as the alternate. Now this black RoboPen design joins the fold as a fourth jersey.

If that weren’t enough, another yet-to-be-released design will make a fifth Pens’ jersey for this season for special use at the Winter Classic in Boston.

82 games for the regular season is a lot, and the Pens will certainly mix it up with the sweaters they are wearing over the course of the season with all those options.

The RoboPen design has been a polarizing concept, but growing in popularity in recent years for folks with a ‘90s nostalgia kick.

When it comes to this actual design they’re going through, ehh, color PensBurgh unimpressed. The best aspect of this jersey (as modeled by Martin Straka in the heading picture of this article) were the gray-to-yellow gradient around the sweater, as well as the silver highlights on the shoulder and also on the cuffs. The 2022-23 version lacks all of this.

It kinda just looks like they slapped the old logo from the ‘90s on the current jersey, put yellow on the shoulders and then angled the coloring on the arms and called it a day. While understanding the concept of the “reverse” retro, there’s nothing worth reversing from the original design.

Most of the other jerseys in this year’s reverse retro design also share that 1990’s nostalgia- from the “Fishstick” Islander jerseys, to the black and bronze “Screamin’ Eagle” for the Capitals — it’s definitely en vogue to bring back the ‘90s at this point.

All in all, I suspect the fans excited about the concept coming back will still be happy to see it come to fruition. We will see the team of today wear this old logo a few times and it will be cool, but I also tend to doubt this exact design will have a lot of staying power or carve out a huge niche for the future.

This effort looks more like just checking a box to bring back a design that will draw some interest, sell a few extra shirts, and eventually fade away. But, after all these years, the Robo Penguin is coming back.

As the team mentioned, these new jerseys will be for sale starting on November 15th. Some NHL teams (including the Pens) have started wearing jersey advertisements, but the good news is that all jerseys sold to fans are ad-free, unless you purchase the jersey at PPG Paints Arena and ask them to customize with the ad patch also included.