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The NBA may do away with both sleeved jerseys, and affordable official replica player jerseys
The NBA might be one step closer to treating sleeved jerseys as the dated novelty that many pegged them as even before their introduction. As the league moves from one shoe company outfitter to another, word has leaked that the new provider might not have sleeves up their particular production sleeves, which would bring a swift end to the noxious 2013-2017 run of the superfluous add-ons.
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Uni Watch’s Paul Lukas found a snippet from behind the Wall St. Journal’s paywall, one that should mollify any concern they may have over an NBA star’s routine being shot to bits just because the league wanted to take a chance on selling a style of jersey that you’ve never, ever seen anyone wear in real life.
Nike is set to take over as the NBA’s “exclusive apparel provider,” from Adidas, starting with the 2017-18 season. The shoe company will have some decisions to make about the templates they’ll inherit. From the Wall St. Journal’s Sara Germano:
Nike, meanwhile, is expected to present its initial NBA jersey designs to retailers beginning this week. The company said it doesn’t plan to produce sleeved jerseys, a style debuted by Adidas in 2013 that received mixed reviews from players and fans.
Yes, that is rather ambiguous, but Paul Lukas has made a career out of divining these sorts of press releases and/or reports, and his take is worth noting:
I saw a few people on Twitter yesterday trying to parse the Journal’s wording (“They don’t plan to do sleeves, but that doesn’t mean they won’t do sleeves”), but come on — the clear implication there is that the sleeved jerseys are on the way out.
Well, then. Such flexibility and freedom.
Sleeves entered the NBA’s style watch in 2013, when the Golden State Warriors debuted their fabrics in the days when Mark Jackson was still preaching his style of play. Reaction ranged from ambivalent to derisive, few outside of excitable brand-humpers truly stood fully behind the change, and almost immediately players began to chafe.
Stephen Curry, still a year and a half before his pair of MVP runs commenced, called them “ugly.” LeBron James complained about their addition to the NBA’s slate of Christmas games in 2013 before his Miami Heat had even played a game in the outfits, prior to slightly stepping away from outright opposition.
He later concluded that his team would “have to figure something out” due to the NBA’s insistence on keeping the jerseys, even after James relayed that he was “not a big fan of the jerseys” following the needless application of the money-making gimmick during an important regular season contest between the Heat and the San Antonio Spurs in the midst of the two teams’ two-year Finals rivalry with each other.
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James famously ripped the sleeves off of his jersey while in the midst of a mini-shooting slump on national TV. Both superstars (along with fellow kvetcher Dirk Nowitzki) have played scads of games in sleeves in the years since, but initial impressions tend to stick.
This hardly stopped the NBA, which doubled-down on the novelty in the final years of its apparel deal with Adidas, the league’s primary outfitter since 2006. The damn things didn’t even sell all that well.
In the league’s defense, commissioner Adam Silver hardly chided (much less fined or suspended) his players for complaining about (what we’d always hoped would be) the trial run, even when eminently fine-able players like Beno Udrih also chimed in about the sleeves. “Ultimately,” Silver told Bleacher Report’s Howard Beck back in 2013, “if the players don’t like them, we’ll move on to something else.”
Or, “if the contract with Adidas runs out and Nike decides that sleeves are trash, we’ll listen to Nike. They sign the checks, and they mostly pick the players and coaches that we send to the Olympics. Was that out loud?”
Of course, it was LeBron’s Cavaliers that decided that the team’s black, sleeved jerseys were good luck in the spring and summer of 2016, prior to riding them (and, well, LeBron) all the way to the team’s first championship over that sleeved-guinea pig from the Bay Area. The team still cares about making points with its apparel, as you no doubt witnessed in the team’s decision to go with wine-colored alternate jerseys (with no sleeves) in the team’s rematch with the Golden State Warriors on Monday night.
And we saw how that turned out.
Lukas estimates that 19 out of 30 NBA teams currently wear sleeved jerseys, with Nike set to take over the NBA’s apparel reign at the start of 2017-18.
What is of actual importance is the fact that, true to form, the NBA and its shoe company partner will move ahead to place advertisements on jerseys. Ensuring that thousands upon thousands of children will be eased into the idea of acting as walking billboards for various corporate interests, just so the NBA and its teams (many of which are valued at well over a billion dollars) can squeeze in a few more millions per year. On the wings of your daughter wearing an ad for an insurance company to the gym.
More importantly, the league (now officially run, in part, by Nike; as opposed to whatever we were calling it before), will start to slide affordable jerseys out of shops.
From Sara Germano at the Wall St. Journal:
Beginning with the 2017-18 season, so-called replica NBA jerseys will be only sold on the league’s website and by online retailer Fanatics, which will manufacture the jerseys. Higher-priced jerseys, similar to the ones worn on-court by players, will be manufactured by Nike Inc. and sold through its retail partners.
Major sports leagues offer different versions of jerseys, ranging from expensive “authentic” ones that are most similar to those worn by players, to replicas which are typically screen-printed on different fabrics. The NBA also sells midpriced “swingman” jerseys, which have most of the same features as player kits but with more simplified stitching.
Replica jerseys made by Adidas AG cost about $70, while swingman jerseys are priced at $110, and the on-court jerseys fetch $300. The NBA said pricing under the new arrangement hasn’t been finalized.
So, the ability to drive five minutes to a non-sporting goods store and spend, say, $40 on a Paul George jersey for your kid (speaking from personal experience) will likely be taken away. It will be high end to no end for the NBA and Nike from here on out.
At least the sleeves might be gone, though. Those things were annoying!
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Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at KDonhoops@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
