The_Admiral

36 minutes ago, SFGiants58 said:

This may just be me, but I really think this “NBA turning point” was the 2011 lockout. That’s when the “weird” started, for lack of a better term.

I think this is correct. 2012, the turning point at which more people had smartphones than didn't, was the beginning of a lot of weirdness beyond the NBA, but certainly including it.

27 minutes ago, JELKK said:

Wasn't the NBA's entire reasoning for not having fully paint covered courts back in the day was that they just thought it wouldn't be aesthetically pleasing on TV?

It was bad enough when the Rockets filled in the entire three-point arc! This is deranged!

So we're doing 2006 concepts in real life. Baseball jerseys with filled-in plackets can't be far behind.

25 minutes ago, bbush24 said:

And I honestly believe that the whole AAU culture of the league (which the uniform/brand mess strongly attributes to) is the primary reason for that.

Stern was a visionary but also a traditionalist in that he firmly believed every team should have a star player so that local fans are engaged with the team and want to see them play. That seems so quaint and provincial now. 

The old league was really good at branding and cultivating a Twitterati following. They didn't seem to excel at much else.

I mean, it's the Chargers, so it's L.A. in name only.  Rams-Cowboys was a questionable matchup of large markets. The Bears are exploring new depths of bad.

It does not go back to Jordan and the Bulls. Social media is too much a part of the NBA's current weirdness, as you said, and that wasn't there then. It wasn't there for the weird Jordan-LeBron interregnum and wasn't really even there for a lot of early LeBron, either. Up through the 2000s, the NBA was still broadly recognizable as a normal sports league. It's only fairly recently that it's become something else.

53 minutes ago, timjameskohler said:

Exactly.  I was always befuddled with how that all worked out. The Browns got to keep their identity and Houston didn’t because…why? The people of Cleveland were more upset or something?

More or less, yes. The relocation of the Browns set everyone off, which included people in government to an extent that the Oilers' move didn't. I don't think the NFL particularly loved the idea of holding an entire franchise's IP in abeyance, but they didn't really have a choice. The people of Cleveland just wanted it more. 

There are two ways to move a sports team: so abruptly that people don't know what hit 'em (Chargers, Supersonics, Nordiques,  Thrashers, L.A. Raiders, and the writers of the book, the Baltimore Colts) or breaking people's will so gradually that eventually everyone kinda wants you gone (Expos, Whalers, St. Louis Rams). The Oilers definitely did the latter, the Browns kinda did neither: they gave the market and state government two months to get mad and do something about it. 

1 hour ago, Old School Fool said:

Normally I would be excited about unveilings and stuff but this In Season Tournament stuff is just really annoying me. I'm sure I will like some of the stuff but it's just so... I don't know, the NBA is evolving in a way that I don't even really recognize anymore from the uniforms, the ads, to various other things. The evolution of Basketball is turning into some weird circus sideshow.

The NBA has had a weird culture about it since the early 2010s but the pandemic took it to a new level. I can't articulate it the way I want to at the moment, but I think it's something we've talked about here and there before.

Yep, it's a truer evolution of the original logo (and also, I guess that was a straight recolor in the NFL, going from slate blue to grey in 2012) and much more engaging. 

One thing I do like about the old Seahawks stuff: green as the bottom stripe on the bird head. Neon green is indeed a fine accent color. It'd look better on the helmets (and anywhere else the logo goes) than grey. 

Kalehoff did the main Braves on TBS theme from the late '90s, but there was also a secondary theme they used for outros. I'm pretty sure he recycled his Card Sharks theme for it: https://youtu.be/uUbZflOGhsw?t=5915

31 minutes ago, SFGiants58 said:

Is Gill Sans too British? Because the shadow variant could work.

I don't think it's too British. Mid-century modern is the note I always thought they were trying to strike, since that's kind of when Houston came of age, and I think Gill Sans fits that. I think it's even pretty close to that original number set.

Did someone miss a deadline to flex Bears-Chargers out of Sunday night? There were three late games more compelling on paper than this.

45 minutes ago, SFGiants58 said:

People love the consistent stripe pattern. Of course, it probably wouldn’t translate well to navy/red/white, as they’d just turn into knockoff Ohio State.

The stripes are a nice feature, but they don't make the uniform. The Oilers' uniform in navy blue would be beyond generic.

I always thought nice tweaks to the 1996 uniforms would have been a return to the old sans-serif (not Futura! I learned!) numbers with drop-shadows to match the sans-serif, drop-shadowed wordmark. Not huge, but something between the blocky 49ers kind and a baseball-style offset. 

On 10/27/2023 at 11:05 AM, GDAWG said:

 

FURRY ALERT FURRY ALERT

Oh, yeah, I forgot, the Dolphins looked great, too. No more toothpaste dolphin. 

6 minutes ago, DCarp1231 said:

The Texans could very much use their regular colors but mimic the Oilers uniforms.

They could, but why? The uniform designs themselves were unremarkable, it was the logos and colors that made them special. 

Then other than shoehorning powder blue into the old yellow/navy bolt, there hasn't really been much of that. The NFL concentrates too much on branding to let major color changes go through without attendant logo changes as well.

Just now, SFGiants58 said:

 

They were also the most out-of-place member of an ancient division (Broncos, Chargers, Chiefs, and Raiders all going back to 1960) and royal/green teams just seemed generally invisible/infamously bad throughout the '70s-early '00s.

That's a big part of it, too. Conference disruptions are big deals for baseball and football teams because of how much you're defined by your opposition. The NFC Seahawks are almost a different franchise from the fifth wheel of the AFC West, and a far superior one at that. 

I guess you could count the Jets bringing back their original uniforms in a darker shade of green than they originally had, or the 49ers tweaking their shades of red and gold, but that's a stretch. The NFL has never encouraged or tolerated paint-bucketing the way the NBA inexplicably has (colors are more important than logos).

The Oilers throwbacks are imperfect, but it was really nice to see them this week. Columbia and red is a strong color scheme, the oil derrick and drop-shadowed wordmark looked terrific on the field, and all of it meant not seeing the crappy Titans uniforms. I have no position on "they should use this full-time," but I maintain that Houston should have gotten the same deal Cleveland got or, better yet, the move should have been disallowed in the first place. It's a classic identity and I think a lot of us missed it.

On the other hand, the Seahawks throwbacks do nothing for me. With the Buccaneers, you can sit and weigh the novelty of the color scheme versus the historic ineptitude of the teams that first wore them versus the ineptitude of the later Bucs teams that wore pewter, but the Seahawks, I dunno, they just look kind of like the Lions but worse and always went 8-8. There's no real emotional valence there. Also, somehow their plastic grass looks like dead actual grass. What's with that.

Ayyyy!!! Tommy DeVito!!! MY GUY!!! NOO YAWK NUMBAH ONE BABY

Why are L.A. and Dallas playing a noon game?

6 hours ago, BBTV said:

Harden (and the Sixers in general) are the anti-Phillies and anti-Eagles.  I can't imagine two franchises that are more involved in the community and where each player independently does so much local work and supports good causes.  They - especially the individual Phillies - truly feel like your neighbors.

 

But the Sixers?  Maybe it's due to Josh Harris' ownership, but other than hiring 3rd-party contractors to half-assedly build basketball courts that people get shot at, haven't done anything of note that I can think of. 

Haven't the Phils been owned for many years not by A Guy but by a whole consortium of local businessmen? Maybe that's kept them a little more grounded in the community than all the NBA teams owned by hedge fund managers from somewhere else. All the small-timers from the old David Stern bloc are cashed out or dead. But even by NBA standards, I've gotten that vibe from the Sixers, too: take their years of tanking while spreadsheet-jockeying and add trying to drop a new arena into a neighborhood because they think they deserve it.

That rule is nonsense, by the way; coaches are entitled to healthy scratches. That's the point of having more players than roster spots. 

I think the window for St. Petersburg representation has loudly slammed shut. For one thing, the city is named after the old capital of Russia, a country that everyone hates. "Tampa Bay" has fully superseded the old "Tampa-St. Pete" as the nickname for the whole metropolitan area* such that even the St. Petersburg Times started going by Tampa Bay instead. Maybe there was a time when branding as a St. Pete team rather than a Tampa team would have made sense, and an StP mongram would have looked neat on a cap, but that time was 1998 or 2008, and not now. 

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