Culture
Why NBA home teams are no longer wearing white jerseys
Every August, after the NBA releases its schedule for the upcoming season, Michael McCullough, the Miami Heat’s chief marketing officer, thinks about the next 82 games. He not only considers ticket sales and promotions but also sets a meeting with the team’s equipment manager and focuses on an essential part of his job: uniforms.
Laying out the right jerseys used to be an easy exercise across the NBA. There were just two choices. When Rob Pimental, the Heat’s equipment manager and travel coordinator, began his career with the Sacramento Kings in the 1980s, it was just white and blue: white jerseys at home, dark ones on the road. What to wear didn’t demand a conversation.
Today, it needs lots of meetings. It has become one of the benchmark choices a franchise can make each season. Over the last six-plus years, jerseys have grown to become not just merchandise but also part of an entire marketing ensemble, a diadem of that year’s commercial enterprise.
Jerseys were once hidebound by convention — not always constant but at least consistent in color and place — but they are now ever-changing. Aesthetically, the NBA looks different from year to year as it introduces new uniforms with each season. It is exhilarating or exhausting, depending on whom you ask. The league is either running into grand ideas behind the creativity of its teams, or it is running away from convention and diluting its storied brands.
The story of the league’s changeover can be told by the erosion of one old mainstay: the home white jersey. For decades, this was an NBA staple. Now, it is increasingly a rarity.
The process to pick jerseys for each of the 1,230 NBA games each season seems simple: The home team picks its uniform first, and the road team chooses next. But it is exhaustingly complicated. What used to be mostly a binary decision tree is now complex.
In a way, it begins years ahead of time. Teams start designing their latest City Edition jerseys with Nike two seasons ahead of their debut.
“It’s like a jigsaw puzzle in many ways,” McCullough said.
The makeover began with the 2017-18 season, when Nike took over the NBA’s on-court uniform and apparel business. Teams occasionally had asked the league to step away from the usual uniform split to introduce or highlight new alternate jerseys. That trend began in the late 1990s and has increased incrementally since.
Still, teams needed permission from the league to do so. Nike brought on a four-uniform system: the Association, a white jersey; the Icon, a dark jersey; the Statement, an alternate jersey; and the City Edition, which changes annually and has no set color scheme. Some teams have a Classic jersey, too.
The Heat wore their white jerseys in Brooklyn against the Nets on Jan. 15. (Nathaniel S. Butler / NBAE via Getty Images)
The NBA streamlined the process. Christopher Arena, head of on-court and brand partnerships for the NBA, used to keep an Excel spreadsheet of every team’s uniform decision for each game, occasionally hunting them down to get their picks in or calling another team to adjust its choice to avoid a color clash. Then the NBA modernized. It debuted NBA LockerVision, a digital database where teams log in their uniforms weeks after the schedule is released.
There are rules on how often a franchise must wear each jersey: Association and Icon must be worn at least 10 times during a season, Statement six times, City Edition and Classic three times. There are guardrails against colors matching too closely, though not all incidents have been avoided. After the Oklahoma City Thunder and Atlanta Hawks played each other in nearly matching red/orange hues in 2021, the league further barred teams from picking jerseys that are too similar.
That upended the regular order. Where white jerseys used to be regularly worn at home, they are now more often seen on the road. Those August marketing meetings are an opportunity to lay out the best times to show off the latest City Edition jersey.
Few teams have leaned in as much as the Miami Heat. In some ways, they are still taken by tradition. Miami’s red-and-black jersey has remained almost unchanged for decades. Every spring, Miami brings back its annual “White Hot” campaign, which has been in place since 2006. The organization wears its white uniforms at home in the playoffs and asks fans to wear white too.
“That’s part of the whole lore of sports, that tradition,” McCullough said. “There’s room, I think, in sports to create new traditions. I like to think that’s what we’re doing, creating other opportunities for people to have another relationship with their team around what the players are wearing. And of course, it’s broadened out for us entire merchandise lines to support these uniforms and to support this second identity. It just becomes kind of who you are.”
As much as those white jerseys mean to the organization, the last few years have allowed the Heat to experiment and debut new designs and color schemes. When McCullough gets the new schedule every summer, he begins to envision the rollout campaign for that year’s latest jersey.
The Heat have created some of the most vibrant City Edition jerseys of the last decade. Their “Vice City” jerseys were a smash hit. The originals were white; subsequent editions have come in blue gale, fuchsia and black. This season, they wear black jerseys with “HEAT Culture” across the chest.
The latest HEAT City Edition uniform is here 🔥
Last night — exclusively at @KaseyaCenter — ticket holders were among the first fans to shop the complete #HEATCulture collection.@MiamiHEAT // @AmericanAir pic.twitter.com/nbH08RmMlT
— Miami HEAT (@MiamiHEAT) November 2, 2023
Most often, they wear them at home. The Heat has programmed those City Edition jerseys to be worn 19 times in Miami and just once on the road. Their Association uniforms — or what used to be known as the home whites — will be worn on the road 24 times.
McCullough wants to make sure the City Edition uniforms get enough appearances in Miami to sink in with Heat fans. He wants the Heat to wear them around the holidays, when fans go shopping. He wants to create favorable environments to show them off and build affinity for them.
“You’ve got this whole narrative you’ve woven around this special uniform that you can only do at home,” he said. “That you can’t do on the road.”
The Heat can build a whole campaign around their latest jerseys by wearing them at home. They unveiled an alternate court in 2018-19 to match their Vice City jerseys and have had one each season since. The franchise can pick and choose when to wear the jerseys if the game is in Miami, so they can prioritize the right days.
The Vice City design became its own kind of brand for the franchise. The Heat’s license plate in Vice City colors is the second-highest selling plate in the state, McCullough said, and is tops among all of Florida’s professional sports teams.
The 5th and final VICE uniform. #ViceVersa @MiamiHEAT // @AmericanAir pic.twitter.com/cMju7UEtV3
— Miami HEAT (@MiamiHEAT) December 1, 2020
“You look at any badass car in south Florida — and you know there’s a lot of badass cars — and they all have the Heat plate on them,” he said. “It is just a cool-looking plate. I’m sure a lot of those plates are not Heat fans. It’s just a badass-looking license plate to have on your car.”
It is a symbol of the Heat’s successful effort. The planning goes across the organization. McCullough surveys Pimental and considers him an unofficial member of the marketing staff. Any uniform decisions are run by him.
Pimental’s job is vast. Whenever the Heat choose their road jerseys, they must consider how it will affect travel. He had to learn how to re-pack for trips after Nike took over in 2017 because of the new possibilities.
For each road trip, the Heat bring a game set of each uniform and a backup set, as well as a few blanks; that’s 40-45 uniforms in each color. If they intend to wear two different uniforms on a trip, they could bring almost 90 different sets.
Then there is everything else: the warmups, the sneakers, the tights, the socks, the practice gear. In all, Pimental said his team and the training staff bring about 3,000 pounds of equipment on road trips.
He calls it “a traveling circus.” It’s a far cry from his early days in Sacramento, but he does not miss the simplicity.
“Sure, maybe (there are) times you get frustrated, but I think it’s cool to have a little more of an identity,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. Fads change, things change. You never know if you’ll go back to white uniforms at home. It’s cool to see different things.
“Before, you only saw the white uniforms at home. Now you get an opportunity to see all the uniforms that we have.”
The NBA isn’t the only league that has abandoned the home white jerseys as its core tenet. NHL franchises have flip-flopped during the league’s history and started wearing their dark sweaters at home again during the 2003-04 season. The NFL lets the home team decide its uniforms, and those teams rarely choose white anymore. Even the Los Angeles Lakers didn’t wear white at home until the early 2000s.
NBA teams began pushing alternate jerseys at home more frequently in the decade or so before Nike took over. Arena believes teams wore their white jerseys at home about 75 percent of the time by 2017.
Now, it is far less. The old uniform rules and expectations no longer apply. Arena does not see this as a wholesale abdication from league norms.
“It was already eroding,” he said. “We just put a paradigm around it. And again, eroding assumes that what it was was somewhat perfect, like some statue, and it was eroding to something imperfect. I would argue it was on the way to being flawed, and we’ve now made it perfect.”
The Association jersey is worn at the same frequency this season as it was during the 2017-18 season, Nike’s first year as the apparel distributor, but the split between home and road is stark. Teams wore their Association jerseys roughly 29 times per season in that first season under Nike, and an average of 17 games at home. This season, the Association jersey averaged 29 appearances per team but just roughly nine times at home.
About 22 percent of all games this season will feature a matchup of two teams each in a color jersey. Teams are scheduled to wear their City Edition jerseys about 14 times this season, with 11 of those at home.
The rules the league has put in place makes some jerseys a skeleton key. The Lakers’ gold Icon jersey can pair with anything, Arena said. Other jerseys — like the Indiana Pacers’ yellow, the Thunder’s orange and the Memphis Grizzlies’ light blue — are also versatile and don’t need to only be worn against white as a counterpoint.
The NBA, Arena said, obsesses “over this more than you can imagine.” Uniforms are a part of his life’s work, and he has been with the league for 26 years.
In that time, the league has undergone drastic changes, switched uniform providers several times and watched a new suite of logos and color schemes pop up. For most of that period, some basics never changed, but wearing white jerseys at home is no longer part of that foundation.
“I don’t know that we ever want to be so steadfast in rules and regulations and tradition and biases that we can’t step outside and listen to our teams and our fans,” Arena said. “I think what our teams are telling us was that our fans wanted to see these different uniforms at home, and they were maybe sick of seeing their team in white every single game for 41 games.
“The benefit, I guess you could say, is they get to see the wonderful colors of the 29 other teams come in. They can see the purple of the Lakers and the green of the Celtics and so forth. But they never got to see their team wearing their colors at home on their home floor, which is an incredible dynamic to see.”
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(Top photo of Jimmy Butler: Issac Baldizon / NBAE via Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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