The NY Islanders made NHL history now comes the nearly impossible part

After two weeks, it's over. More than 80,000 fans submitted jersey designs to the New York Islanders' historic contest. Now comes the impossible task of picking just five finalists.

When the Islanders launched their "Design the Third Jersey" contest on July 8, they expected fans to embrace the opportunity to create the franchise's official third jersey for the 2027-28 season. What they probably didn't expect was to receive 80,490 submissions in just over two weeks.

How many did you submit? That's as impressive as it is overwhelming.

The Islanders became the first team in NHL history to hand the creative process over to their fans, allowing anyone to build a jersey using 15 striping options, 53 color combinations, nine Islanders logos and eight different font styles through the club's online jersey builder.

The response exceeded every expectation. Somewhere inside those 80,490 submissions are the five designs that will advance to the final round of fan voting, and finding them won't be easy.

Islanders President of Business Operations Kelly Cheeseman predicted there would be "a lot of submissions" when the contest launched, but even he likely couldn't have imagined the volume his committee would ultimately face.

Of course, no one is realistically going to sit in a room and review all 80,490 jerseys one by one.

The most likely approach is a combination of technology and human evaluation. The Islanders could first eliminate duplicate or nearly identical submissions, group similar concepts together, and use image-recognition software to identify recurring patterns, logos and color schemes. From there, the committee could review a much smaller pool of unique designs before debating which five deserve to move on to the fan vote.

Another possibility is dividing the submissions among multiple review teams, with each group forwarding its favorites into a final "best of the best" round. That's a common approach in large-scale design competitions and would dramatically reduce the workload while ensuring every submission still gets seen.

Or maybe they'll just ask super intern Cal Clutterbuck to do it?

No matter how they approach it, narrowing more than 80,000 fan-created jerseys down to just five finalists may end up being one of the most difficult off-ice decisions the organization has ever made.

And no matter what the five finalists are, there are going to be some fans that love them and others that feel better options were left out. Good luck!

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