The NBA's New Uniforms: A By-No-Means Comprehensive Rundown
Every NBA team tried to get better this offseason, but only a few tried to get better looking. Some of these teams succeeded. Some of them are the Clippers.
Every NBA team enters the offseason trying to get better, whether by positioning itself for a playoff push or moving forward a rebuild. Only a few teams decided that they'd try to look better next season, and only a few of those succeeded. What follows is a brief rundown of the NBA's offseason aesthetic overhauls, from the successful (not the Clippers) to the not successful (the Clippers). It is one person's opinion, but an issue as important as "What The Basketball Men Are Wearing" deserves nothing less.
Philadelphia 76ersAs the old adage goes, "If you can't win, you might as well look good while losing." The Sixers have done and will do plenty of losing. But the new 76ers uniforms are so fresh that maybe fans will be able to astral travel during some dreary midseason loss to a future in which a team wearing these uniforms is running the Atlantic Division. There is a critique to be made that these jerseys are too safe or too square, but that critique is also wrong. Not every uniform update is going to be in the vanguard, and if you're not on the bleeding edge, you might as well look good.And these look good. The seven stars on the left side and the six stars on the right—see, 7-6, 76ers!—are a nod to the team's glory days, as is the PHILA. wordmark on the home and away jerseys. In a league with a tendency towards ham-handed futuristic looks—see Cleveland's many, many crummy logos this century, or keep reading until you get to the Clippers—it's nice, if not surprising, to see the Sixers willing to let the future take care of itself.
Atlanta HawksBut if you are going to go with a forward-looking approach, you might as well do it right. The new Hawks look marries the franchise's past—they used neon green waaaay back in the day—and present. Making the "Pac-Man" logo the full time and official logo, adding the neon green and incorporating the "triangle"-weave thing into the jerseys and shorts has Atlanta looking right. The mix-and-match aspect of the black, white, and red jerseys is a risk, and the downside is nothing less than looking totally hideous. But this is a gamble worth taking, and if it brings back Gatorade colorways, we'll all be grateful.
Milwaukee BucksThe Bucks, from a competitive standpoint and from an aesthetics standpoint, have been wandering the desert for years now. The new uniforms are objectively a big leap forward for the team. Gone are the clashing Christmas In Every Month red and green look; adios, too, to the purple and greens of the Glenn "Big Dog" Robinson administration. In their stead are some impressive and nicely restrained new togs. A muted cream speaks to Milwaukee's brewing tradition—and drinking present—while a rich hunter green serves as a nod to the state's patchwork of forests and farmland. The blue accents not only represent Milwaukee's Lake Michigan shoreline, but also the bodies of water that crisscross the entire state. The new uniforms cover what's beautiful about Wisconsin.But while the new colors and uniforms are a refreshing and much-needed update, the new "Robo-Bango" logo is a misfire. It's not a bad idea to seek a balance between the franchise's many rather staid iterations on a deer and a sleeker look, but that is not a good logo. The overwrought negative spacing "M" in the deer's neckline; the dead, robotic eyes; the too-cute antlers that evoke the grip lines of a basketball—this is between one and two elements too many. It feels more like marketing for marketing's sake than anything in concert with the organization's top to bottom reboot, which included last year's surprising playoff run.
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That said, the Bucks did come up with a cool logo this offseason. It's just that it's the new secondary logo, which features "Bucks" in a really neat typeface designed for the team over a cutout of Wisconsin. This may be an unforgivably populist notion, or a reflection of the time I spent in the Dairy State, but the Brewers, Packers and Bucks are more or less professional franchises for the entire state; the Bucks secondary logo speaks to that. Given the team's troubled campaign for a new arena, it's hard to know how much longer the Bucks will be in Wisconsin. Might as well celebrate it while it's still accurate.
Charlotte HornetsAfter resorting last season back to the old 1990s teal and purple color scheme and trashing the "Bobcats" nickname, Michael Jordan and Co. have debuted a new alternate jersey that flirts with the trashy side of the spectrum without actually looking bad. This is a relative term, as these new black-and-teal unis have nothing on the old Charlotte Bobcats/NASCAR-checkered-flag crossover monstrosities of the Gerald Wallace-era.Still, the black alt uni as a whole should have run its course by now. The color scheme, a relic of post-Y2K-tension, is better suited to a mid-major college football team, and looks and feels like a grab at merchandising money. They could certainly be a lot worse, though, and some tween will be made very happy when one of these with Jeremy Lin's name on it turns up under a Christmas tree come December.
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Clear Losers
Toronto RaptorsAfter trying and trying to shed their long-running Jurassic Park-vibe, Team We The North have stumbled into yet another uniform dead end. The new logo, a basketball scarred by Raptor claws, is a perfectly acceptable evolution from the previous "dinosaur-basketball" footprint logo, and another step away from the Literally A Dinosaur Playing Basketball era. And yet the Raptors find themselves in the loser pile due to their most recent uninspired update of those uniforms. A slightly blockier font? Minor tweaks to the still-tired racing stripe accents? The entire get-up suggests an effort towards yesteryear kitsch that the Raptors are not quite old enough to pull off. This organization is 20 years young—be bold, dammit! And the new "Drake" alternate uni? Nah. That color scheme? Extremely mid-2000s Wizards' alternate uniforms. You know, the team the Raptors were swept by in the first round of the playoffs this past season. Started at the bottom, pretty much still at the bottom.
Los Angeles ClippersThere's a lot we don't know about what Doc Rivers, Steve Ballmer, Chris Paul, et al told DeAndre Jordan during their totally bonkers-as-heck, last-minute, last-ditch, borderline kidnapping plot/visit to Jordan's Houston home after his initial defection to the Dallas Mavericks. But we can at least guess this with some certainty: they probably steered the conversation away from the team's new uniforms and logo. The Clips' new duds, which were first reported by UniWatch's inimitable Paul Lukas back in April, strike the same visual tone as an algae-coated Mylar Fourth of July balloon discovered in a lake's shallows sometime in September. Sure, the colors are mostly right, but something about it reeks of sadness and disappointment.The team's new logo looks for all the world like the work of an intern that just added "PhotoShop" to his LinkedIn page's skills section. Rather than maintain any semblance or aspects of the former, and rather than having a clean script "Los Angeles" and "Clippers," the Ballmer regime opted for a complete overhaul of all things dating back to the Donald Sterling Administration.It's certainly understandable that the team would want to erase all signs of the soggy-minded, profiteering bigot who made his fortunes on the labor of the very minorities he so despised. Revamping his uniforms and logos could be seen as a needed first step. But in their haste to flush the stank legacy of the former racist boogeyman-in-chief, the Clippers settled on something somehow tackier, cheaper, and more tossed-off than the look associated with Sterling. Sterling is a vile, pathetic person. But he has the edge on Ballmer when it comes to fonts.
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Los Angeles ClippersThere's a lot we don't know about what Doc Rivers, Steve Ballmer, Chris Paul, et al told DeAndre Jordan during their totally bonkers-as-heck, last-minute, last-ditch, borderline kidnapping plot/visit to Jordan's Houston home after his initial defection to the Dallas Mavericks. But we can at least guess this with some certainty: they probably steered the conversation away from the team's new uniforms and logo. The Clips' new duds, which were first reported by UniWatch's inimitable Paul Lukas back in April, strike the same visual tone as an algae-coated Mylar Fourth of July balloon discovered in a lake's shallows sometime in September. Sure, the colors are mostly right, but something about it reeks of sadness and disappointment.The team's new logo looks for all the world like the work of an intern that just added "PhotoShop" to his LinkedIn page's skills section. Rather than maintain any semblance or aspects of the former, and rather than having a clean script "Los Angeles" and "Clippers," the Ballmer regime opted for a complete overhaul of all things dating back to the Donald Sterling Administration.It's certainly understandable that the team would want to erase all signs of the soggy-minded, profiteering bigot who made his fortunes on the labor of the very minorities he so despised. Revamping his uniforms and logos could be seen as a needed first step. But in their haste to flush the stank legacy of the former racist boogeyman-in-chief, the Clippers settled on something somehow tackier, cheaper, and more tossed-off than the look associated with Sterling. Sterling is a vile, pathetic person. But he has the edge on Ballmer when it comes to fonts.