NHL Players No Longer Have to Wear Suits. Here’s How They’re Dressing Instead.

Last month, the Edmonton Oilers flew to New York for their first road game of the new NHL season. Thanks to the league’s new relaxed dress code, for the first time ever the team flew in matching navy tracksuits. They looked cohesive, chic—and perhaps most importantly—comfortable. Flying in tracksuits might not seem like a big deal for most professional sports teams, but it is in the NHL. Prior to this season, teams were required to wear full suits onto the plane, change into sweats for the duration of the flight, and then put their suits back on for the short walk off the plane to the team bus and the drive to their hotel. Now, they can dispense with the charade, wearing outfits that are “consistent with contemporary fashion norms” not only on and off flights, but to and from games.

Scrapping the traditional dress code—which stipulated that players had to “wear jackets, ties and dress pants” to and from all games—was one of the biggest changes in the latest collective bargaining agreement that the NHL and NHL Players Association rolled out in July. According to a recent player poll about the new CBA, it was the revision that players were happiest about.

Mikhail Sergachev—the two-time Stanley Cup winner and alternate captain of the NHL’s newest franchise, the Utah Mammoth—was thrilled when he learned that the change, originally planned for the 2026-27 season, was being moved up a year. “I just started working with a stylist this summer,” the imposing Russian defenseman told GQ over Zoom. “We both got really excited and started ordering suits and looking at NBA players and rappers to get started.”

Utah Mammoth defenseman Mikhail Sergachev has been one of the standout dressers of the NHL’s new era.

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Sergachev rocking a sick studded varsity jacket before a game against the Minnesota Wild.

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According to menswear expert Derek Guy, who had urged the NHL to abolish its dress code on X about a month before the league announced the change, the cons of such strict sartorial requirements greatly outweighed any pros. Especially because, whether it was due to the conservative approach to fashion favored by the majority of NHLers, or the made-to-measure companies they tended to get their suits from, the suits they wore often looked like they were straight out of 2010.

“Many of these [suiting] companies are run by people who are primarily businessmen, not tailors,” Guy explained. “They will come up with a very trendy, dated kind of silhouette, which tends to include a short jacket and slim, cropped trousers with a low rise. That might work if you’re built like a Hedi Slimane model, but that’s not going to work on the average guy off the street, and it’s definitely not going to work on a professional athlete.”

So if a good casual outfit is better than poor tailoring, what are the early returns for this new sartorial freedom? Are NHL players actually throwing fits now? Not exactly.