The Battle of Alberta will head outdoors next season as the Edmonton Oilers host the Calgary Flames for the seventh edition of the NHL’s Heritage Classic.

The game is being held at Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton on October 29, 2023, and it’ll celebrate the 20-year anniversary of the 2003 Heritage Classic, which was the first-ever regular-season NHL game to be played outdoors.

The Oilers were in their Copper and Blue uniform era at that time, so they wore throwback jerseys from the 1980s during the 2003 Heritage Classic against the Montreal Canadiens…

Now that the white, orange, and blue look from the 80s is back in the Oilers’ current uniform rotation, they’ll likely look in a different direction to create a throwback for the 2023 Heritage Classic. Back in January, Tyler Yaremchuk reported that the Oilers were considering using the Edmonton Mercurys as their inspiration…

The Mercurys were a Senior-level hockey team based in Edmonton in the 1940s and 1950s comprised largely of former Junior-level players who worked at a Mercury car dealership. In 1951, the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association determined that the Mercurys would represent Canada at the 1952 Olympics in Olso, Norway. They won seven games and drew one in an everyone-play-everyone format and won the gold medal. Canada didn’t win another gold medal at the Olympics until 2002.

The assumption is that the Oilers will use the Mercurys’ design as a base but will incorporate their own orange and blue colour scheme along with their own namesake and an oil drop as the main crest. A local artist designed a mock-up of what Edmonton’s 2023 Heritage Classic jersey could look like based on Yaremchuk’s report…

To me, this is the perfect Mercurys throwback. It maintains consistency with the team’s original look, from the rectangular shoulders to the text being written on an old-fashioned banner, while also nicely incorporating the Oilers’ brand and aesthetic.