Digby

It'll really take something special for every team to live up to the lofty branding standards established by the event called "In-Season Tournament".

I still think about the ads for “St. Petersburg-Clearwater” that their tourism board used to constantly push during the Boston televised sports events of decades ago. Though that maybe primed me to forever thing of it as a dorky tourist town and not a proper city with an MLB team.

But LockerVision doesn't seem to suggest any new jerseys for the In-Season Tournament (check Fridays in November starting with the 10th). Though it does suggest that, during the tournament, all the home teams will wear their City jerseys. It's possible that LockerVision is throwing us off the scent, though the away teams for these games are mostly wearing light jerseys too, so I don't see that as likely. Also possible that any special Tournament jerseys will only be used for the quarterfinals or Vegas games, but can't imagine the wasted inventory that would be needed for that to happen. … feel like the most probable thing is that the teaser graphic is just gonna tease the rest of the Citys being unveiled leaguewide, even if the colors don't line up with all the jersey base colors.

I like white at home in American sports in general. Feels traditional. Hockey has been weird since they mostly stopped. (I know the NFL doesn’t do this but I don’t care about football, so.) in basketball, too, you see more team color on the playing surface than you do in grass or ice sports. Wearing white with team color trim ensures the home team always matches their surroundings. An away team with a different color scheme looks less out of place if they can sneak by with a white uniform. Wasn’t it an old NHL guy who said away teams should wear color so home fans see a variety of color depending on the night? I agree with that, too. That said, I don’t mind color vs color either if there’s sufficient contrast. But I really don’t like white on the road in the NBA, and more, I don’t like the total lack of consistency that makes any given night’s uniforms look as if they were picked randomly for both teams.

LockerVision has a shockingly traditional Christmas Day on the books -- every game is Association (white) home, Icon (standard color) away, except for the 8pm EST game where Miami had to wear their red Statement at home (forcing Philly into their white jerseys). The past several years have seen a lot of City Edition showcases on Christmas so I find it refreshing and proper to get away from that on the NBA's ostensible marquee day.

The longer this guy sticks around, the more he's going to become the Mormon Vivek. But ironically with less purple. Good luck Jazz fans.

But this is getting into the same zone that last year's Penguins WC uniforms did, where I just feel like a cream base and gold trim end up clashing a bit. Though that one was better because it was more dark-color heavy. Just a lot of nice ideas dragged down by bad color choices from the Bruins this year!

Appreciate the mods' commitment to fairness here but like, this is not the rule of law. At the very least some de-escalation would be helpful to keep things on-topic and productive.

because the Red Sox thing was different by orders of magnitude. Calling it the “same thing” is literally wrong. anyway, I think a big reason the Astros weren’t death-penaltied is because a ton of teams were all cheating like this to some extent. They were obviously taking it to a particular extreme and had lots of extra baggage with their front office full of creeps and weirdos, but yeah. my favorite of this was the Red Sox/Yankees mutually assured destruction tattletale on each other over Apple Watches in what, 2017? PitchCom is up with the pitch clock as modern innovations that are just no-brainers in 2023 that came way too late.

Idk, I don’t think we can really compare those international jerseys (worn for exhibitions only) with the total brand-departure jerseys that are worn for 20 percent of a season now. The contexts here are huge.

I thought it was more that Apple just wanted more games generally, and this (plus expanding the field) is the best way they came up with doing it? Although yeah, I think it's good overall when even low seeds get to host playoff games. This is why I'm still team two-legs until the finals, no away goals, keep the playoff field small enough to make this number of games manageable.

11 days between games one and two of the Philly/Revs playoff series. Every year they come up with a new format but it’s always terrible in a new way. This really shouldn’t be that hard.

It's weird they're so committed to this bit, while the on-pitch product evolves away from the global standard, with all this nonsense about PKs without extra time, a best-of-3 playoff series, league hostility to the fairly normal concept of two-leg aggregate series. Like the worst of all worlds.

Does SUM control branding at all? I’d imagine there’s some centralized approval process but every recent rebrand has suggested that the teams themselves hire various different creative agencies, e.g. apparently this club used an agency that doesn’t do much sports but did do the Costa Rica fed. Sounders talked about a local design group there that they worked with. I think LAFC and Chicago mk.3 had hired Wolff. Etc. in short, it’s on the teams and their execs to get their partnerships right and produce good work.

I’m a little shocked the league office let this happen. I’m used to MLS identities being dull, safe disappointments… but not as outright amateurish and dated from the jump like this. I feel like asking what they were thinking about every part of it.

I love Reading Terminal Market so I hate to admit that I like that jersey. But it’d be better off using just Phila or Sixers… the way these jerseys always have to use a different design AND a cutesy wordmark phrase AND an unusual color scheme is almost always doing too much. the inevitable Sixers x Geno’s Steaks design is going to burn some eyeballs.

Well, there already is a commuter rail stop at the stadium. They don't run the train on Saturday nights though, and there aren't enough Revs fans to make doing so worth it, the way they run special trains there for Patriots games or big concerts. If you mean the subways of the MBTA, that would make sense but I don't see the obvious site where this would happen that hasn't already been tried and failed. Unfortunately, with all the renovations happening at Gillette Stadium, the 2026 World Cup games there, and the fact that the Revs are a top-10 team in the league in attendance (22k per game this year, last I saw) ... I think the ship has sailed, as far as a Boston-ish SSS goes. I don't know how to make the economic case for it, even assuming that ticket prices would double. The current rumor of the past couple years has been a site across from the new Wynn casino in Everett, atop some decommissioned oil tank fields or something toxic. Even that, though, I'm not aware the rumors have been anything beyond people saying "hey, that would be a sensible location for it", and again I don't see how the numbers work unless the casino itself is funding the whole thing to help along their dream of turning Everett into the Las Vegas of the East. Also, no public transit to that location whatsoever, despite it being close as the crow flies to downtown. Best option would have been that old Expo Center site in Dorchester circa 2017 or so. Of course they put so little effort into getting the approvals right that the rocket exploded on the launch pad and calling it a "plan" is generous. Oh well, at least the parking lots are free.

It's Mike Gorman's last year on the mic for the Celtics, and NBC Sports Boston has hired Drew Carter (guy who did the Toy Story football game) as his transitional-year fill-in and full-time replacement. People are mad given that Sean Grande has become pretty beloved on the radio for the past 20 years and did well as Gorman's road-trip replacement on TV last season. But he's twice the age of the new guy and presumably asks for/deserves a better salary. New guy seems professional enough and I'm sure he's a nice guy but man, this is the Celtics broadcast. From Johnny Most to Mike Gorman to... this guy.

Possible city leak circulating around Celtics Twitter. I was kinda hoping they'd go for a Vice-esque rotation between various colorways of last year's Bill Russell jerseys... but, this could be acceptable, with a clean old-school wordmark and their underutilized gold trim.

I think the NBA has adopted enough from the increasingly unsustainable world of global soccer (yearly jersey changes at least for one... in-season tournaments... jersey sponsors...). There is not one single way to run a sport and the NBA would do well to be its best version of itself. If "running identities into the ground" is the issue, I don't see how the global soccer style solves anything -- you have two different away jerseys that are, with few exceptions, seemingly designed arbitrarily with random color choices even more mystifying than your average NBA City jersey. The reason soccer gets away with it is that teams wear their primary look 2/3rds of the time. You go to Anfield and you see Liverpool wearing all red, not lavender or aqua. You go to the TD Garden now and you might see the Celtics wear the classic white jerseys that Bird and Russell wore, but maybe they'll wear green, maybe they'll wear black, maybe they'll wear something goofy with weird fonts. And they've been, arguably, the least ridiculous team in the Nike era.

Turns out the VAR who should've overturned that decision was jet-lagged from moonlighting with the UAE league or something like 48 hours earlier. Not great! The whole VAR concept needs a total overhaul or scrap at this point, it's only caused as many problems as it's solved.

I still don't like the "Bruce Lee Kit" whatsoever and the new Sounders crest still feels a bit too generic-Seattle to me, but I do have to say the design looks much nicer in that higher contrast, dark color as the background shield application.

Alternate designs, "City" inspired looks, artist collaborations etc. are one thing but for some reason plastering your dumb locker room sloganeering onto the jersey is a new level entirely of stupid. Doesn't seem very "Heat Culture" at all! This is the kind of thing that belongs on the cheapo t-shirts they give away to all seats at a playoff game, that's it. Miami should very obviously just rotate through 3 or 4 Vice color jerseys and be happy with it.

This is only slightly less sketchy than that brief era of every third club signing up a crypto token as a sponsor. How the mighty have fallen.

Wake was THE Red Sox guy just because of how long he was there, as a real bridge between the late era of the sad Sox and the World Series victories. I mean, he was there in three different decades! All the way back to my childhood when these things really imprint on your sports-fan mind. And it's absolutely devastating that he has two teens and a wife who also has cancer. And so quick, too -- how do you go from perfectly healthy to dead at age 57 in a matter of weeks? Brain cancer is terrifying, ugh.