During the latest edition of the 2015-16 Kobe Bryant retirement tour, the Los Angeles Lakers were on the road to face off against the team that drafted him (sort of. Let’s not get into the semantics of Charlotte’s basketball history, here): The Charlotte Hornets. Since the Lakers were on the road, they went with their obvious choice of wearing their purple road uniforms. However, since this is the NBA in 2015, that means that a color-on-color matchup was always a possibility, and the Hornets chose to go with one of their color uniforms.
Obviously, Charlotte’s road purple was out of the question here. Did this mean that the Hornets would just go with the sensible option of wearing their teal uniforms? Of course not — they decided to wear their black “Buzz City” sleeved alternate uniforms, and what we got on the court was a black-on-purple matchup, which means that the two colors clashed in a bad way.
Thank goodness for the gold trim on the Lakers’ uniforms, because if that wasn’t there, then this would be an even bigger clash and this decision probably wouldn’t have been made. But somehow, this still got OK’d, and we got an absolute mess of a color clash.
Now, the sad part about this is that just last season, these two teams combined to make one of the better color-on-color matchups that you’ll see in this league. During their visit to Charlotte for the 2014-15 season, the Lakers decided to wear their home gold uniforms, and the Hornets wore their teal alts. What we got was a bit of color-on-color majesty.
That makes the purple-and-black event that we saw above even sadder. Come on, Lakers and Hornets — y’all can do better than what you did last night, and this is proof!
Normally I’d end this by trying to be optimistic and having faith that we wouldn’t see another color clash like this, but considering that this isn’t the first time that we’ve seen something like this happen this season, I highly doubt that this will be the last time we see a bad color matchup in the NBA this season.
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