The NBA is giving us an early Christmas present: NBA uniforms that actually look cool. After badly missing on the NBA Christmas Day uniforms in the past, leaked images of the new uni’s suggest the NBA has corrected it’s past mistakes and will be pushing out a much better product for the 2015-16 NBA season.
The guys at Uni-Watch.com unveiled the new NBA Christmas uniforms, and though we’re months away from seeing them on players when they’re live and in action, it’s still an exciting development.
No More Griping?
One of the biggest things about the new Christmas Day uniforms is that they should appease many of the star players that complained about the old jerseys that had the tight sleeves. LeBron James was one mega star that went public about his disdain for the sleeves, as he confessed it negatively impacted his shot. They looked a tad restrictive, so we won’t doubt King James on that note.
So, on top of potential improved performance on Christmas Day, we’ll also get less complaining. It’s a win-win!
Key Notes
Cursive! I’m personally torn on how I feel about the cursive font on the front of the jerseys for every single team, but it’s at least partially cool. It comes off feeling somewhat sophisticated and absolutely retro. That aspect has some of the Christmas uniforms feeling the same, but if you think about it, they probably should. Sophisticated appears to be the running theme here, too, as the fellas at Uni-Watch point out some other cool tidbits about the new uni’s.
In fact, the guys over at Uni-Watch make plenty of good observations and we don’t want to flat-out copy their opinions, so we went ahead and jotted our own down before reading their article. We did notice later that we agreed on some key notes, however. One big one was how these new Christmas NBA uniforms (some of them) pay homage to some NBA team’s traditional jerseys.
For instance, the Washington Wizards jersey has two stripes encasing their name on the front, just like they normally do with their current, regular jerseys. The Portland Trail Blazers also get their classic diagonal design around their name on the front of their jerseys, as well. Those are the two most obvious ones, while the Orlando Magic also have their usual blue pin stripe look, which looks pretty snazzy with the creamy white as the back drop.
The nicknames are also gone from the Christmas uni’s, which is good and bad, depending on how you look at it. Some people think it’s silly to use a nickname for a guy that basically is just his name (D-Will, D-Rose, etc). Names like King James, Flash or The Truth are where it’s at, but other guys don’t even have true nicknames, so it was probably a good idea to class Christmas Day up a bit this time around.
Best and Worst?
There are definitely some winners and losers in this group. We can’t be sure just yet which teams will actually grace the court come Christmas Day, but we know which ones we’d prefer and which should burn their jerseys right away. I’m not a fan of the Indiana Pacers, San Antonio Spurs, Brooklyn Nets, Denver Nuggets and Los Angeles Lakers when it comes to the new jerseys. Perhaps the alternates with color would bring more out of them, but as they stand in these photos, they come off very basic and quite bland.
The best have to be Portland and Washington, as they look very retro and rather slick. Miami’s rich red jerseys look solid, too, while you could chalk up the Kings, Magic and Timberwolves as winners. The rest meet somewhere in the middle. Then again, I’m only one set of eyes and we have a lot of time between now and Christmas to decide which jerseys are best.
Which new NBA Christmas uniforms do you love or hate? Let us know in the comments below!
