There’s another World Cup going on this Summer, and it’s also for another pretty popular sport as well: Basketball. This event used to be known simply as the World Championships, but they decided to rebrand it into the FIBA Basketball World Cup, and in order to avoid clashing with the FIFA World Cup, they’ll have their next event in 2019. But enough about that, what you came here to see is a uniform, and as you can tell by the title, USA Basketball’s uniform set has leaked.
With a hat tip to friend of the site Conrad Burry, here’s a look at the uniforms:
If you’ve been following the World Cup, you can tell that Nike’s got a thing for chevrons as of late, and it definitely shows in their effort for USA Basketball. The stripes across the top of the jersey thin out moving from left to right on both jerseys. On the navy shorts, there are navy stripes on a red background that start off pretty thick at the top but get thinner as they go down to the end of the shorts. On the white shorts, the stripes are thin at the top but eventually come together to form a big navy chevron at the bottom of the shorts.
Looking at it from afar, it gives the effect that the colors are fading, as you can see in the photo below (h/t to @arcaneNLSC for this photo).
Also, the font and wordmark that debuted on the 2012 Olympic team’s jerseys returns for the 2014 World Cup jerseys, so a change in that department probably wouldn’t be expected until the 2016 Olympics. The only differences are that the script on the navy jersey is white with red outlines, and both jerseys have the same colored script and numbers. This is in contrast to those 2012 jerseys that had a red wordmark with navy numbers on the white jersey and a red wordmark with white numbers on the navy jerseys.
Clearly, the 2014 set of uniforms for USA Basketball have a whole lot more going on in their design than in previous incarnations that have gone for a simple, “less-is-more” design. What do you think? Are you feeling the new USA basketball jerseys for 2014, or do you think it could have been better?