Archive for the 'Uniforms' Category

Here's a fun question: Which uniform number is the best in NBA history? As in, which number has seen the most production from the men wearing it?

For the answer, let's turn to our uniform number database and use Win Shares, which includes defense and does a good general job of separating out the good players from the bad ones. You may quibble with WS when it comes to individual players, but over huge samples of many different players, it's the perfect tool for a question like this.

Here are the most productive numbers in NBA history (not including 1950 or '51, since they didn't track minutes those years):

Read the rest of this entry »

In case you missed it, Sunday's New York Times featured a fashion & style story relevant to the basketball set, an Adam Wilson piece centering on 20-something hipsters whose outfits of choice include the jerseys of 1990s-era NBA players. A few of the players paid homage to on the streets of NYC:  Mark Price, Ed O'Bannon, Glen Rice, Isaiah Rider, Jerry Stackhouse, and Michael Jordan (#45 variety, naturally).

Of course, no discussion of ironic vintage NBA apparel would be complete without also acknowledging the legendary Straight Cash Homey Dot Net, who for more than three years has been posting a collection of the most ridiculous jerseys in captivity. The majority of the people in their photos lack the self-awareness about jersey selection that the East Village hipsters have, but then again, when you're sporting an Isaac Austin jersey, does the level of irony with which you wear it really matter?

New Wizards owner Ted Leonsis has stated that he's open to the possibility of changing the Wizards' team colors, if not their name. As we all know, the Washington Bullets had a good color scheme going throughout their history, but the prevalence of gun-related fatalities in the nation's capital led Abe Pollin to change the team's nickname to the Wizards -- and change the team colors to a scheme that not even God Michael Jordan himself could make look good. However, now that Leonsis is in charge, there's been a groundswell of fan support to change the colors -- and name -- back to the way they were before the late 1990s. Of course, my hunch is that it will stay the "Wizards" for the foreseeable future out of respect to Pollin... but a change back to the old red, white, & blue colors is highly probable. Here's my take:

Read the rest of this entry »

Over at Uni Watch, Paul Lukas has been posting some fun "uniform tweaks", new uniform concepts for (mostly baseball) teams. He has presented some basketball ones, of course, but since I created a ton of NBA & CBB uniform re-creations in MS Paint a long time ago, I thought I'd try my hand at some tweaks, redesigns, and "fauxbacks" (aka "a retro-ish uniform that is clearly meant to evoke a particular design from the past but does not quite duplicate that design faithfully, sometimes due to laziness or inattention to detail, sometimes intentionally") in an ongoing series here at the blog. Some of them will be bad, I admit that going in. But some of them will hopefully be cool, or at least different. And if you have any of your own, I'd love to post them as well, so hit me up with an e-mail and send me what you've got.

Read the rest of this entry »

From the Houston Rockets' site, the unveiling of a new alternate uniform reminiscent of their old 80s/90s uni.

As someone who has dabbled (very minorly) in basketball uniform design as a hobby, I can definitely appreciate this: a graduating senior at the University of Tennessee (alias "conradburry") recently put together a final design project called "NBA Europa," an 8-team European NBA spinoff complete with crests, shields, logos, jerseys, and more. He even documented the entire process of creating the league with a blog. Pretty cool, if you ask me (then again, I'm the kind of nerd that used to create imaginary dice baseball leagues when I was a kid)...

Besides, with David Stern making noise from time to time about actually expanding league operations to Europe, don't be surprised if you see something like this in real life at some point in our lifetime.

(H/T: UniWatch.)