So, when I made that crack the other day about how the NHL’s new “chromified” logos seemed like something the NBA would do…
The NBA today officially unveiled their chrome “BIG Logo” sleeved Christmas jerseys for the ten teams playing on December 25th as well as a handful of others. Those ten Christmas Day teams will actually wear these t-shirt jerseys during their games, I’m *guessing* the others are for retail only.
We got our first look at the ‘BIG Color’ jerseys last week when an eBay user accidentally put up a series of “warmup shirts” for sale on the auction site. The listings were quickly deleted after they were confirmed to be the league’s Christmas jerseys for 2013-14.
The “BIG Logo” promotion comes on the heels of last Christmas’ “BIG Color” in which teams wore single colour uniforms head-to-toe including team names and player numbers.
“Last season’s ‘BIG Color’ holiday campaign was an overwhelming success, grabbing the attention of our fans, and we wanted to find a way to top it.” — Jamie Gallo, NBA Executive VP of Marketing
Well, yes, it certainly generated attention, but was it good attention? I guess there’s no such thing as bad publicity…
“We worked closely with adidas to create an innovative new uniform design for our Christmas Day games. The BIG Logo collection will provide a unique look on-court and a variety of products for our fans.” – Sal LaRocca, NBA Executive VP, Global Merchandising
NBA, adidas… Meet me at camera three.
I really am all for trying something unique, which these certainly are, but why does it have to be the exact same design for every team? I think that’s the most graphically offensive aspect of this promotion. The NBA and adidas were, frankly, very creative in coming up with the idea of doing this, whether you like it or not it is a unique idea and approach to an NBA basketball jersey. But did they use up all their creativity points when it came to designing the look for each team?
It’s such a disturbing trend in pro sports these days, let’s come up with one or two designs and then apply it across every single team. Use the paint bucket tool in Photoshop to fill in the appropriate team colour and paste their logo on the front. We see it in MLB with the BP caps and jerseys, we see it in the NHL with their practice jerseys and some of the Rbk Edge re-designed jerseys in ’07, and we see it every Christmas in the NBA.
I’m actually starting to hope for a return to the days when logos were designed by some 20-year-old intern working at the local advertising agency and uniforms were nothing more than cheap hand-me-downs from the closest college team with the new team name stitched on.
Thank you.
Anyways, if you want to buy one of these jerseys, the NBA has them up for sale on their official shop site, they’re going for $109.95.
There’s a video produced by the league showing players wearing the new jerseys playing “Jingle Bells” by shooting hoops, it gives you an idea of what these uniforms will look like in action…
As you’d expect it basically it looks like the players are wearing their pre-game warm ups.
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