Every August, after the NBA releases next season’s schedule, Miami Heat chief marketing officer Michael McCullough thinks about the next 82 games. Not only did he think about ticket sales and promotions, he also held meetings with the team’s equipment managers to focus on an important part of his job: the uniforms.
Across the NBA, putting together the right uniforms used to be a no-brainer. There are only two options. When Heat equipment manager and travel coordinator Rob Pimental started his career with the Sacramento Kings in the 1980s, the team’s uniforms were only white and blue: white at home, Wear dark jerseys on the road. No conversation is needed about what to wear.
Today, there are many meetings to be held. It has become one of the benchmark choices teams can make every season. Over the past six-plus years, jerseys have become not just a commodity but a part of the entire marketing package, becoming the crown jewel of commercial enterprises of the year.
Jerseys were once stuck in a rut by convention – not always the same, but at least consistent in color and position – but now they’re constantly changing. Aesthetically, the NBA looks different every year as new uniforms are introduced each season. This is exciting or exhausting, depending on who you ask. The league is either running into big ideas behind the creativity of its teams, or it’s straying away from convention and diluting its legendary brand.
The story of the league’s transformation can be told through the erosion of an old pillar: the home white jersey. It’s been an NBA staple for decades. Now, it’s becoming increasingly rare.
The jersey selection process for each of the 1,230 NBA games each season seems simple: The home team picks its jersey first, then the visiting team picks its jersey. But this is extremely complex. What used to be mostly binary decision trees has now become very complex.
In a way, it started a few years early. The team began working with Nike to design the latest City Edition jersey two seasons before its debut.
“It’s like a jigsaw puzzle in a lot of ways,” McCullough said.
The shift began in the 2017-18 season, when Nike took over the NBA’s on-court uniforms and apparel operations. Teams occasionally ask the league to abandon the usual uniform divisions to introduce or highlight new alternate uniforms. This trend started in the late 1990s and has gradually increased since then.
Still, teams would need permission from the league to do so. Nike has launched a four-piece uniform system: the association’s white jersey; Icon, the dark jersey; Statement, the alternate jersey; and the city version, which changes every year and has no fixed color scheme. Some teams also have classic jerseys.
The Heat wore white jerseys on January 15 against the Nets in Brooklyn. (Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE via Getty Images)
The NBA has streamlined the process. Christopher Arena, the NBA’s director of on-court and brand partnerships, used to keep an Excel spreadsheet of each team’s uniform decisions for every game and occasionally look for them for their draft picks. , or call another team to adjust their selections to avoid color clashes. Then the NBA modernized. It debuted NBA LockerVision, a digital database that teams can log into their uniforms weeks after the schedule is released.
There are rules for how often teams must wear each jersey: the Association and Icon versions must be worn at least 10 times in a season, the Statement version must be worn six times, and the City and Classic versions must be worn three times. While not all incidents can be avoided, there are steps you can take to prevent color matches that are too close. After the Oklahoma City Thunder and Atlanta Hawks played in nearly matching red/orange hues in 2021, the league further banned teams from choosing uniforms that are too similar.
This upends the normal order. People used to wear white jerseys at home, but now it’s more common on the road. The August marketing meeting is the perfect time to showcase the latest City Edition jersey.
Few teams are as committed as the Miami Heat. In some ways, they still follow tradition. Miami’s red and black uniforms have remained virtually unchanged in decades. Every spring, Miami resumes its annual “White Hot” event since 2006. The organization wears white uniforms at home in the postseason and asks fans to wear white jerseys as well.
“It’s part of the whole lore, the tradition, of the sport,” McCullough said. “I think there’s room 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 players wear. And certainly our entire merchandise The collection has all been expanded to support those uniforms and support that second identity. It just becomes a part of you.”
While these white uniforms mean a lot to the team, the past few years have allowed the Heat to experiment and introduce new designs and colorways. When McCullough receives a new schedule each summer, he begins envisioning the launch of the latest jerseys that year.
The Heat have created the most dynamic City Edition uniforms of the past decade. Their “Sin City” jerseys were a huge hit. The original was white; subsequent versions came in blue, burgundy, and black. This season, they wear black jerseys with “HEAT Culture” emblazoned on the chest.
The latest Heat City Edition jerseys are here🔥
Last night – exclusive @KaseyaCenter — Ticket holders will be among the first fans to purchase the full production #HEATCulture collect.@miamiheat // @American airlines pic.twitter.com/nbH08RmMlT
— Miami Heat (@MiamiHEAT) November 2, 2023
Mostly, they wear them at home. The Heat designed these City Edition jerseys to be worn 19 times in Miami and just once on the road. Their association uniforms – or home whites as they were formerly known – will be worn on the road 24 times.
McCullough wants to make sure the City Edition jerseys get enough exposure in Miami to attract Heat fans. He wants the Heat to wear them while fans go shopping during the holidays. He wanted to create a conducive environment to showcase them and build rapport with them.
“You’ve woven an entire story around this particular uniform, and you can only do it at home,” he said. “You can’t do that on the road.”
The Heat can wear their latest uniforms at home all season long. They introduced an alternate stadium to match the Sin City uniforms in the 2018-19 season and have had an alternate stadium every season since. If the game is played in Miami, teams can choose when to wear their jerseys so they can prioritize suitable days.
The design of Vice City has become a brand unique to the series. McCullough said the Heat’s Vice City-colored license plate is the second-highest-selling license plate in the state and ranks first among all professional sports teams in Florida.
The fifth and final VICE uniform. #vice versa @miamiheat // @American airlines pic.twitter.com/cMju7UEtV3
— Miami Heat (@MiamiHEAT) December 1, 2020
“You look at any super car in south Florida – there are a lot of super cars – and they all have Heat badges on them,” he said. “It’s just a cool-looking plate. I’m sure a lot of these people are not Heat fans. It’s just a license plate that looks bad on your car.”
It’s emblematic of the Heat’s successful efforts. This planning occurs throughout the organization. McCullough investigated Pimental and believed he was an unofficial member of the marketing staff. Any unified decisions rest with him.
Pimental’s work ranges widely. Whenever the Heat choose a road jersey, they have to consider how it will impact travel. When Nike took over in 2017, he had to learn how to pack his bags and travel again, given the new possibilities.
On each road trip, the Heat carry one set of each jersey and one set of alternate jerseys, as well as some blank jerseys; there are 40-45 uniforms in each color. If they plan to wear two different uniforms on a trip, they can bring nearly 90 different uniforms.
And then there’s everything else: warm-ups, sneakers, tights, socks, practice gear. Pimental said his team and training staff carried a total of about 3,000 pounds of equipment on the road trip.
He called it a “traveling circus.” It’s a far cry from his early days in Sacramento, but he doesn’t miss the simplicity.
“Sure, maybe you get frustrated (sometimes), but I think it’s cool to have more of an identity,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Fashion changes, things change. You never know if you’re going to come home and wear a white uniform. It’s just cool to see different things.
“Before, you only saw white uniforms at home. Now you have the opportunity to see all of our uniforms.”
The NBA isn’t the only league to abandon its home white uniforms as a core tenet. NHL teams made a shift in league history and began wearing dark sweaters at home again in the 2003-04 season. The NFL lets home teams dictate uniforms, and those teams rarely choose white anymore. Even the Los Angeles Lakers didn’t wear white at home until the early 2000s.
About a decade before Nike took over, NBA teams began releasing alternate jerseys at home more frequently. Arena believes that by 2017, approximately 75% of teams will be wearing white jerseys at home.
Now, it’s much less. The old uniform rules and expectations no longer apply. Arena doesn’t see this as a wholesale abandonment of league norms.
“It’s been eroded,” he said. “We just put a paradigm around it. Again, erosion assumes it’s kind of perfect, like some statues, but it’s eroding into something imperfect. I think it’s heading towards flaws, and we’ve now made it Become perfect.”
Association jerseys have been worn with the same frequency this season as they did in 2017-18 (Nike’s first year as an apparel distributor), but the gap between home and away games is stark. In Nike’s first season at the helm, the team wore the association jersey approximately 29 times per season, playing an average of 17 home games. This season, each team has played an average of 29 games, but only played about 9 times at home.
About 22% of the games this season will feature two teams wearing colored jerseys. Teams plan to wear the City Edition jerseys about 14 times this season, 11 of which will be at home.
The league has rules that make some jerseys master keys. Arena said the Lakers’ gold Icon jerseys can be paired with anything. 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 be paired exclusively with white.
Arena said the NBA’s commitment to this is “beyond your imagination.” The uniform is part of his life’s work and he has been with the league for 26 years.
During that time, the league has undergone significant changes, changing uniform suppliers multiple times and seeing the emergence of a new set of logos and color schemes. For much of that period, some basic principles never changed, but wearing a white jersey at home is no longer part of that foundation.
“I don’t know if we want to be so entrenched in rules and regulations and traditions and biases that we can’t go out and listen to our teams and our fans,” Arena said. “I think what our team is telling us is our fans want to see these different uniforms at home and they’re probably tired of wearing white every game for 41 games.
“I guess you could say the benefit is they get to see the wonderful colors of the other 29 teams. They get to see the Lakers’ purple and the Celtics’ green and so on. But they never see it at home. It’s an incredible energy to have your own team wearing your own colors.”
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(Top photo of Jimmy Butler: Issac Baldizon/NBAE via Getty Images)
