Our five favorite Winnipeg Jets jersey design concepts

It's July 23 and we're just under two months away from the opening of NHL training camps. Teams are pretty much set with their rosters for next season as preparations are already on-going.

One piece of business for the 2011-12 NHL season that's yet to be decided on is what exactly the Winnipeg Jets will be wearing.

On Friday True North unveiled the team's new logos, which the jury still seems to be out on. True North chairman Mark Chipman told the media after the logo unveiling that the jerseys will be released in September and that a third jersey won't be in the cards for this season because there wasn't enough time.

While it pains us that our Teemu Selanne "Goals for Kids" jersey from his rookie year will be considered outdated next season (though still incredibly awesome), we understand True North wanting to go in a bit of a different direction and release some Jets swag different from the previous incarnation to make gobs and gobs of money.

(Our idea would be to have piping, a stripe or a small color change as the "tweak" and let Jets fans feverishly dump their wallets on store counters for the new garb that would look very similar to the vintage stuff we've been buying since 1996.)

While we wait for True North to reveal the jersey designs, fans have created their own concepts to what they think should become the look of Winnipeg 2.0 Thanks to Icethetics and PuckDrawn, their creative readers have come up with a slew of ideas.

After the jump, we choose our five favorites from the bunch.

This one from Untvar via PuckDrawn for the "Manitoba Nanooks" garners an honorable mention because if there's anything a hockey jersey needs, it's a giant freakin' angry polar bear on it in lavender.

5. Chris Smith sent this in to Icethetics and like many of the Jets concepts features the red, white and dark/navy blue colors in it. The Jet shape on top of the W and engine in the logo is a neat touch (pointed true north, get it?) and the mix of different colors make us wonder how much better this jersey would look on an HD television.

4. We've harped on the overuse of navy blue in jerseys, but here's one situation where it just looks like a good fit. From Ross Taylor, a fresh logo design (to be among majorty of NHL teams that don't use the team name in it) mixed with a goldish color and the neck laces gives it a different feel.

3. Johnny Griswald of Puck Drawn with a sharp entry here. The jet in the logo might actually pop out if we had our 3D glasses from Captain America on. It's a simple design with not a lot going on around it. In some cases, less is more.

2. Alex Valvo's submission (main photo above) doesn't stray much from the original Jets jerseys, which lots of fans have clamored for. You've got your old Jets jersey with a few RBK tweaks to it, along with a colorful third. Jets fans would have definitely bought something similar considering it's almost an entire generation later that's going to experience NHL hockey in Winnipeg for the first time.

1. Finally, Jacob Webster's design won Puck Drawn's Winnipeg logo and jersey design contest last month and rightfully so. It has a bit of a San Jose Sharks feel to it, but the logo is sharp, the bomb shoulder patch is a unique addition and the color scheme is makes us smile that it's not mostly navy blue or black.

Scrolling through the various concepts submitted by readers on Icethetics and PuckDrawn convinced us that the people in the NHL and with RBK making jersey decisions should click through these sites often to get inspiration. The designs are superb and we'd would absolutely buy at least 95-percent of the jersey mockups posted on these sites.

For more designs, you can check out the entries in HireTheWorld.com's Jets contest. Most submissions, however, are just logos.