Digby

I’m just glad Pastrnak wore the 80s era jersey instead of the RR Pooh Bear. Regardless of the context necessary to make that happen.

Half those Celtics wins were against a less-than-full-strength Nets team with a coach in over his head. As December showed, the Nets are as good as their potential would suggest when their roster physically and mentally healthy (now that they have a real head coach). The Heat haven't had a stretch anywhere close to that strong this season.

Nets already lost all their future assets trading for a different guy who's no longer on the team, so they probably need to get whatever less-than-full-value they can get in return. My schadenfreude is currently torn between a half-season of him actively sabotaging Nets games the way he did that Celtics/Bucks semifinal, or limping through a Lakers lineup that's even more injury-prone with an even thinner bench. I don't know if Nets fans have it in them to be as vulgar with the Kyrie chants, but Celtics/Cavs fans welcome you to the club anyway.

That's three goals in four games for Gio Reyna at Dortmund. (All, I must point out, coming off the bench.)

So the reading between the lines here is that they "Ich bin ein Berliner"ed this one, right? At a time when colonial treatment of Indigenous peoples is under renewed scrutiny for historical atrocities in Canada? Incredible stuff. Good thing they caught it but really speaks to how poorly this franchise has been run for so many years.

I'd really like the Crew to go back to black/gold hoops or stripes one of these years. Thought it would've been a good time to try that when their other jersey was greyish white. Oh well!

Ah yes, when I think GOAT, I think Darlington Nagbe. More than the legacy American sports leagues, MLS pushes the brand of the league itself more than that of its clubs. I guess that will be less obvious if teams have different color jerseys for a change rather than 2 out of every 3 games being mono-white vs. mono-black. But still, yeah, the obviousness of fitting teams into given design initiatives from Adidas every year is kind of a bummer.

Dillon Brooks delivering a “Power Slap” sponsored nut punch just now in Cleveland.

Celtics have beat the Nets 10 times in a row, which is hilarious. Hex of disrespecting the leprechaun logo.

I find those to be fun as a design challenge, and they're nice aesthetically. But I'm not sold that ASG jerseys should be too close a riff on the host market's team. This is what they tried in 2021 when the game was meant to be hosted by the Pacers (and was the standard in the 70s), and regardless of the merits of the unis themselves, I don't like seeing a bunch of non-Pacers out there dressed like off-brand Pacers.

Didn't Coogi, Inc. file a lawsuit over those jerseys because Nike and the team were trying to pass it off as "Brooklyn camo"?

This is the worst possible matchup in the type of game that shouldn’t allow these picks. The Knicks in black (esp with the alt court) shouldn’t exist and they’re admitting they’ve been punked by Brooklyn, which is humiliating. The Lakers throwbacks are fine but maybe save those for a random non-national TV home game, or away to the Wolves if you wanna be cute.

Well, I guess they heard us complaining about the overload of all-white away kits, at least.

That was the year of a million throwbacks, right? https://news.sportslogos.net/2014/01/17/chicago-cubs-unveil-four-throwback-jerseys-for-2014/baseball/

Nike loves a system. Shades of the NBA contract, where Nike rightly stick for wacky City jerseys or needlessly rotating thirds, but we forget how the end of the Adidas era was pretty unhinged with the likes of the Warriors and Lakers and even the Spurs would have like 6 different jerseys in a year. Four jersey options is plenty (especially if throwback nights and City Connects are excluded) (City Connects should be excluded from everything entirely tbh) My biggest concern here is a team with a white jersey and then three different solid-color jerseys (excluding a grey). Settle on your team colors already!

There was such a weird lack of edge and urgency in a winnable game. Beverley decided after the camera move (which was hysterically funny btw) that that was the end of his heroics. Welp! Also I know it’s a general theory that the bad calls even out in time, but with the advent of the last two minutes report, this all gets very selective — what about that we should technically not have gotten to that point because the refs missed an offensive foul on Davis? Both with the whistle that should’ve been and the foul trouble at clutch time he would've been in? I dunno, it all turns into butterfly-effect guessing games quickly. Better to just yell at the refs, generally, for sucking. And then to do so again when they self-flagellate because even THAT gets the star treatment.

Even some of the generic II clubs have managed to figure out identity pieces better than the parent. This isn't perfect, but it's an improvement by virtue of not acknowledging the "Club Internacional" whatever nonsense that clutters up the real one. Feels like Inter Miami's logo reading as "Inter Miami" is probably a good idea.

The abstract crown thing is much nicer than the icon webfont crown that the parent club uses, but it doesn't work terribly well in a roundel. Maybe they could rip off the layout of the modern Sacramento Kings logo as a soccer crest and hope nobody notices.

I hate the original colors so not that. I’d consider the navy and “northwest green” or whatever to be the definitive Mariners scheme in a way that Padres and brown also were. I guess Seattle has at least never fully abandoned it, just abandoned it 3 days a week and also in spring, or something. I can see a Nike redesign pulling from Hawks bright green and some copy about the tech zeitgeist to take that lowercase wordmark pedigree and spit out something that’s zany levels of modern.

In Boston I’ve always seen that gray jerseys seem to sell better to fans than one might think. Maybe here it’s because those have the names on the back (though modern home replicas don’t seem to care about that), maybe it’s because gray is more casual and goes with things more than a bright white jersey. But the sales may be a team-by-team thing. Re Seattle, I’ve always defended their look as a modern classic but they’ve really gone death by a thousand cuts here. The navy would be fine (boring, but fine) if it used normal block numbering and not that dated, try hard serif font. The teal only works at home. The cream is a disaster, and the powder blues were around so briefly that I’ve already forgotten about them. This team desperately needs a Padres-style reboot, on and off the field.

I was thinking more Colombia national team. They play there too, in a sense. At any rate, going to take some real getting used to.

$50 million expansion fees is absolutely crazy growth for NWSL. Speaks to how well the business side has figured things out, even if they still haven't solved the nonstop scandals on the sporting side. Bay Area team seems like a lock for the Earthquakes stadium in San Jose. I'm a little shocked Boston's getting a team, and that people are willing to invest so much money in said team, when the old problem of where to play pro soccer in Boston remains severely unsolved. As far as I know, neither team has any involvement from the MLS teams in the same markets, so this will cost some people so, so much money to get off the ground -- I guess it's a big bet on progressive/filthy rich markets.

I assume "technical advisor" is some code for "we keep paying him to avoid any further legal messes until the contract is over". Have seen comments how he'll never work in American soccer again, which is ridiculous. He's successfully fused the two archetypes that have run the federation forever -- the World Cup Pedigreed Ex-player with the Toxic Unhinged Soccer Dad/Youth Coach. Funny, then, that his kid might be the future. Also saw that Austin has made Josh Wolff their interim Chief Soccer Officer, continuing the thread of bizarro job titles. Who let the consultants in?

Whether or not this is an intentional homage to the red rocks jerseys, these take the worst part -- white text on yellow background -- and made it worse! Basic legibility feels like an important step in the design process.

Comparing these things on a sport-to-sport basis is probably a fruitless endeavor. Hockey and soccer are almost certainly more demanding, I suppose football is but more for its barbaric aspects. Baseball is probably more a mentally taxing sport with the precision of the action and the grind of daily games, but the physical demands? I cover more ground walking from the subway to Fenway than the players do in the course of action. As far as load management goes and these pampered kids these days, but let's not forget the Moneyball type FOs of the NBA see advantage to drafting guys who'll be out a year so they can prolong the tank anyway. There's more incentive for teams to shut players down at the slightest hint of anything to protect their investments and look to tank. (This can work in the player's favor, as we saw last year with Old Al Horford turning the clock back three years after OKC gave him a half-year off for no reason.) I don't even know if you can do that; the game back then was more "physical" in terms of pure contact but today's game covers more ground at a faster pace. Bruises and impact injuries vs. fatigue injuries are different beasts besides. The turn of the millennium is probably when MPG peaked but at a historically slow pace of the game compared to earlier and later times. I don't even know that swinging the officiating dial back to incentivize defense and physical contact would change much; the return of the hand check would be nice, but you simply have way more role players who can shoot than you used to, and that plus the general tactical trendiness of taking 3's has been a far more fundamental shift in how the game's played.