An epic Twitter thread from Twitter-er @brandon1an has revealed the fronts and backs of all 30 NBA City Edition jerseys for the coming season, along with some of the shorts. The designs, which match the previous leaks that we’ve seen, have been confirmed as legitimate by multiple sources. By my count, nine of them are completely new, meaning we haven’t seen them via previous leak or an official release. Many of the others are much better views than we had previously seen.
Here are all 30 of them:
Atlanta Hawks
Boston Celtics
Brooklyn Nets
Charlotte Hornets
Chicago Bulls
Cleveland Cavaliers
Dallas Mavericks
Denver Nuggets
Detroit Pistons
Golden State Warriors
Houston Rockets
Indiana Pacers
Los Angeles Clippers
Los Angeles Lakers
Memphis Grizzlies
Miami Heat
Milwaukee Bucks
Minnesota Timberwolves
New Orleans Pelicans
New York Knicks
Oklahoma City Thunder
Orlando Magic
Philadelphia 76ers
Phoenix Suns
Portland Trail Blazers
Sacramento Kings
San Antonio Spurs
Toronto Raptors
Utah Jazz
Washington Wizards
———
Obviously, most of these are somewhere between pointless and awful. I can’t bring myself to dignify them with any further commentary, except to say that the Nuggets’ design is particularly bad because it fails both aesthetically and functionally — putting “5280” on every jersey is going to annoy spotters, refs, broadcasters, and probably fans too.
Okay — have at it!
Really pushing the BFBS this year, ain’t they?
I will say, when I saw the San Antionio jersey, I said, “that’s freaking cool.”
18 of the 30 look to be either black or dark gray.
Creative bankruptcy.
lotta charcoal. the fashion trilateral commission must have been at a cookout when they made their color selections this year.
No joke and the majority of them, the color doesn’t make sense. I hate Nike’s push to have black/charcoal or whatever as a base uniform color.
Almost all are blue, red, gold, purple, or black.
Make of that what you will.
Agreed on the San Antonio jersey. That one is really cool. I imagine the Wemby version of that jersey will sell out.
I like the Orlando one, despite it being dark colored. The design elements look fantastic put together.
And…that’s about it. The uniforms look like something designed by a freshman design class. Most of them are not good
That’s a really nice Detroit Tigers road basketball jersey.
I was bummed when I saw the Bucks went blue with their alts but after the funeral procession of most of the others, I’m almost happy with them.
Literally one of the top three in the mix.
Why are half of these the same ugly dark grey color? Did Nike order an extra warehouse of it by mistake?
I bet they meant to order “green” but it got autocorrected to “grey”. That’s why they can’t get any green unis out on time. They got too much grey fabric and no green!
As I was scrolling I was thinking to myself, “this is a truly depressing amount of black and gray,” then got to the Wizards jersey at the bottom to see that it’s both black AND gray! These are almost all ugly designs on the whole but I think that one takes the cake as the worst.
It looks for a jersey for Medieval Times.
The Kings jersey should be a full time alternate
Glad to see New Orleans is paying homage to the Haunted Mansion. Just need the Hatbox Ghost to model it.
In all seriousness, almost all of these are terrible. Denver’s might be the worst of the bunch, and that’s saying something!
Man, I used to look forward to these. This feels like the City editions are over. These feel like concepts from design students. The Wizards are exceptionally bad even for them!
Design students? Design students would have done better than this
These look like they belong in a Disney channel Halloween special about a spooky high school basketball tournament. The nets has to be a joke… it has to be. And there’s nothing funny about how bad the wizards is. That is a 100% pure unadulterated free range organic dog shit sandwich. And the Celtics? Talk about a team that should be exempt from these novelty programs. But they gave them a uni with cartoony fake wood trim that’s not even parquet? That’s damn near disrespectful. The warriors isn’t totally awful, but the jersey trim flares at the bottom and the shorts trim isn’t flared at the top. Even tucked in I think that’s going to look odd.
The Knicks would be one of the best, if not for the word mark.
DC – is that supposed to be like copper turning green because there are lots of statues and such around DC?
Yeah, it’s more statue/monument BS. I hope Nike someday realizes DC is a city of 700,000 people most of whom don’t visit touristy/federal DC at all. There’s SO many more culturally relevant things they could pick, but they keep choosing nonsense.
I think the Spurs jersey is stellar. It’s like creamsicle Bucco Bruce met University of Wyoming and decided to do a basketball jersey. Oddly, it works for me.
Glass half full…
With 75% of the league now in black or gray its means fewer color vs color games
Where do I begin?
Looking at the Nets and the Pacers, it looks like the designers put their kids in charge.
The Raptors uniform reminds me of that one friend, who’s favorite jersey started out a beautiful white. Well, that was 7 years ago, and no amount of washing will get it clean. But he still insists on wearing it.
If I play in San Antonio, and this is hanging in my locker, I’m asking to be traded.
Portland ‘s is ACTUALLY nice.
Completely agree, I can’t believe how cartoonish the Nets and Pacers look. A+ for the Kings. I like Boston’s as an alternate. Milwaukee and Minnesota’s are at least serviceable. Utah is okay because it looks like a throwback. After that, truly awful. I go to a couple Cavs games every season and will be sure to steer clear of games they wear theirs because of that ridiculous font.
Honestly Paul, I thought you would at least be interested in the fact that the Nuggets jersey has to be one of few jerseys that don’t include any primary logos or words/letters as the team identifier on the jersey. Just some numbers and mountains, which is somewhat unique.
Can’t tell if you’re joking, but just in case you’re serious: Uniqueness, in and of itself, is not a virtue, or even a value. Plenty of non-unique designs are much, much better than that Nuggets design.
Nowhere did my comment imply that you’d like it or that it was good design. It’s just unique. But this friendliness is why I won’t be renewing my Substack when it expires. This blog has quit being Uni Watch and become Paul Lukas Hates Everything.
The “You just hate everything” bit is what people always say to any kind of professional critic (music, movie, food, uniform). I accept it as part of the job, even though it’s obvious that I’m enthusiastic and positive about all sorts of uniforms.
While I don’t hate everything, I do hate bad design, and most of the uniforms shown in this post fall under that heading (especially Denver’s, which I singled out because it’s fails both aesthetically and functionally). If you think most of them are examples of *good* design, that’s totally your prerogative, but we’ll have to agree to disagree.
I will point out that the comments on this post indicate that lots of other people think these designs are bad. That doesn’t automatically mean I’m right, of course, but it does mean that I’m not off on some extreme, inexplicable line of thought that’s waaaay out of the mainstream or somehow Paul-specific. As always, YMMV.
I thought had to be sarcasm. Guess not…
I really like Utah’s – looks like a modern version of their 90s jersey. it’s a shame it’s getting lost in this dumpster fire of a program.
Utah is really lacking a visual identity right now (remember how their official colors are black, white, and yellow?). I’d love to see this purple jersey, their old city edition red rocks jersey, a white uniform with both purple and orange trim, and a throwback jersey in their wardrobe. That would be exponentially better than their current set.
I’ve always loved this Utah rebrand concept:
link?locale=en_US
I think the Jazz’s visual identity is much clearer now than it has been in a few years. The primary colors are black, yellow, and white, and purple is an official accent/alternate color. It’s much clearer than wearing a navy, yellow, and green jersey one game, a purple one the next, and then a black, red, orange, and yellow one the next.
I agree on some of your points.
That Utah jersey is, IMO, the best of the bunch by far, and I think that they should make it their primary home jersey, adding an away. I disagree that they need to change their colors, though. The purple, yellow, and black work well together.
The Red Rocks were great, that is undeniable—again, at least IMO—but combining that color scheme with purple seems like an absolutely terrible idea to me.
I like it, though there’s too much blue in it and too much blue in the league in general. I think they should just ditch the Jazz name/colors entirely and go fully into the red rocks side of things.
If you didn’t know any better, you might jump to the conclusion that Nike is trying to get out of their NBA deal by turning in offensive work.
They’re visually damaging the NBA product and individual team brands at this point.
These are bad. Really, really bad. Hardly a good one in the bunch — Houston, Memphis, Portland, and Sacramento are probably the least bad of the bunch. I agree with others that San Antonio’s are solid in a vacuum, but they also don’t look like the Spurs. At all.
The only one I liked the most is the Utah Jazz’s.
Wow, just very bland and boring, Rockets look like Clippers and Bucks looks like Sonics.
They should just do reverse retro.
I see the Wizards went with more of a Harry Potter kind of wizard feel.
Nah, that’s just more monument worship. It’s based on the Zero Mile Marker, something nobody in the District cares about.
Denver is an all time bad design.
Every time I see that Clippers jersey I misread it as Chips and want to grab some kettle chips.
ugh
The irony is that since so many of these are black or dark grey, it limits the amount of matchups where both teams can wear city uniforms
This is the season where the City program should officially die. A truly embarrassing ensemble. The Jazz is great, I kinda like Minnesota, and had the Knicks not been stupid with their wordmark, theirs would be solid. Everything else is varying degrees of brutal. Even though I’m a traditionalist, I was open-minded about this program. But this is proof positive that it has outlived whatever usefulness it had.
Woof. Guess the economy must be pretty strong if folks have the cash to buy any of those ugly a** uniforms.
I can’t wait for The Land to play the 5280s!
But seriously, the Kings one is nice. And that’s the only one that’s nice.
Keep San Antonio and Utah. Burn the rest.
What is with all the black?!?
Dear NBA…awful.
My simple rankings, from worst to best:
Brooklyn, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Golden State, Indiana. LA Clippers, Memphis, Miami, New Orleans, New York, Oklahoma City, Orlando, Portland, San Antonio, Washington – BLEH
Atlanta, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, LA Lakers, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Toronto – Meh
Boston, Charlotte, Minnesota, Utah – Ehh?
Sacramento – YES!
This is a battle to see who can make the ugliest basketball uniform.
I like the dark grey one with the nonsense script. /s
It’s ironic to me that, in spite of the made-up nicknames, the “City Edition” sets seem to illustrate less sense of place than teams’ normal uniforms. Almost any of these could be worn by any other team, and they’d make just as much (little) sense.
The Kings uniform is my favorite, but I think it would be better as a Clippers design. Some of them have an element or two that could be cool, but they don’t look finished or fully-realized as an actual sports uniform that actual athletes would wear. Many of these look like concepts that would (or should) only exist as concepts.
Conceptually, I like the idea of using the thigh area of the shorts for a bigger logo (like Chicago has done here), but it doesn’t always look great in real life. I could also see that becoming very over-done if everyone starts to do it.
Did Nike hire some Make a Wish designers ? Because most of these are a disgrace.
Utah and Sacramento are fine, the rest should be burned.
I think Orlando and Philadelphia could be salvaged if they were in team colors. Imagine having a uniform representing the city of Orlando – the land of Disney and all things bright and fun – and it’s gray on black. WTF?
I’d fix the “city of BROTHERLY love” bit on Philly’s and make it blue with red trim. I kind of like the neon light treatment of the wordmark and number font.
Sacramento shines like a shaft of gold while all around is dark.
Minnesota’s “Land of 10,000 Lakes” wording – I get what they’re going for. It does look like water..ice even and the white on top. Which is appropriate considering those 10k lakes are frozen and covered with snow for most of the NBA season.
The Wizards design is bad, but the two tone color and inexplicable red stripe make them unsalvageable.
You know the new uniform every year thing has jumped the shark when you can’t distinguish between a random set of internet concept designs and the real thing.
This all has to stop. Becoming insane. Just horrible. I can’t take an NBA uniform unveiling seriously anymore. So many of these look nothing like the team’s identity.
I’m trying to figure out, why the Clippers didn’t go with a red color for their City Edition uniforms? Are they allergic to that color or something?
What a mess. Even the four or five that are visually interesting are based on a misguided idea of what the team’s identity ought to be. Start from scratch and pick a throwback that is appealing (say, the navy and green Denver uniforms with the rainbow) or iconic (the Dominique Wilkins-era Atlanta suits) and roll with it. It’s not rocket surgery!
Why are these so bad? Some of them — BKN, Indy come to mind — literally look like they’re made in MS Paint. Golden State’s isn’t even a complete thought, it’s someone forgetting what they were saying halfway through the sentence. The Kings one is nice.
I’m from New Orleans. I cannot fathom what the designers of the Pelicans’ jerseys were trying to represent.
As Charles Barkley says, “Turrible”.