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Every August, after the NBA releases its schedule for the upcoming season, Miami Heat chief marketing officer Michael McCullough thinks about the next 82 games. He not only considers ticket sales and promotions, but also schedules a meeting with the team’s equipment manager and focuses on an essential part of his job: uniforms.
Sorting out the perfect jerseys throughout the NBA used to be an easy task. There were only two options. When Heat’s equipment manager and travel coordinator Rob Pimental began his career with the Sacramento Kings in the 1980s, it was just white and blue: white jerseys at home, dark jerseys on the road. There was no need to negotiate what to wear.
Today, it requires a lot of meetings. This has become one of the benchmark choices that a franchise can make each season. Over the past six-plus years, the jersey has become not only a merchandise, but part of the entire marketing suite, a symbol of that year’s commercial enterprise.
At one time the jerseys were steeped in tradition – not always constant but at least consistent in color and location – but now they are constantly changing. Aesthetically, the NBA looks different from year to year as it introduces new uniforms with each season., It’s either exhilarating or exhausting, depending on who you ask. The league is either running on grand ideas behind the creativity of its teams, or it is running away from tradition and diluting its iconic brands.
The story of the league’s transformation can be told by the erosion of an old mainstay: the home white jersey. For decades, this was a major theme in the NBA. Now, it is becoming increasingly rare.
The process for choosing jerseys for each of the 1,230 NBA games each season seems simple: The home team chooses its uniforms first, and the road team chooses the jerseys next. But it is very complex. What used to be mostly a binary decision tree has now become complex.
In a way, it starts years ahead of time. Teams begin designing their latest City Edition jerseys with Nike two seasons in advance of their debut.
“It’s like a puzzle in a lot of ways,” McCullough said.
The change began with the 2017–18 season, when Nike took over the NBA’s on-court uniforms and apparel business. Teams have sometimes asked the league to move away from the usual uniform splits to introduce or highlight new alternate jerseys. This trend began in the late 1990s and has grown steadily since then.
Still, teams needed permission from the league to do so. Nike came up with a four-uniform system: Association, a white jersey; Mark, a dark jersey; Statement, an alternative jersey; and the City edition, which changes every year and has no set color scheme. Some teams also have classic jerseys.
The Heat wore their white jerseys on January 15 against the Nets in Brooklyn. (Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE via Getty Images)
The NBA streamlined this process. Christopher Arena, head of on-court and brand partnerships for the NBA, kept an Excel spreadsheet of each team’s uniform decisions for each game, sometimes hunting them down to find out their preference or their preference for another team. were called to adjust so that this could be avoided. Color clash. Then the NBA modernized. This led to the introduction of NBA LockerVision, a digital database where teams log their uniforms weeks after the schedule is released.
There are rules on how many times a franchise must wear each jersey: Association and Icon must be worn at least 10 times during a season, Statement six times, City Edition and Classic three times. Guard against colors matching too much, although not all incidents can be avoided. After the Oklahoma City Thunder and Atlanta Hawks played each other in nearly identical red/orange uniforms in 2021, the league prohibited teams from choosing very similar jerseys.
This reversed the regular order. Where white jerseys used to be regularly worn at home, they are now seen more often on the road. Those August marketing meetings are an opportunity to find the best time to show off the latest City edition jersey.
Few teams have leaned in as much as the Miami Heat. In some ways, they are still taken by tradition. Miami’s red and black jerseys have remained virtually unchanged over the decades. Every spring, Miami brings back its annual “White Hot” campaign, which has been in place since 2006. The organization wears its white uniforms at home in the playoffs and asks fans to wear white as well.
“It’s part of the whole lore of the game, that tradition,” McCullough said. “I think there is scope to create new traditions in sports. I like to think that’s what we’re doing, creating other opportunities for people to have another relationship with their team around what the players are wearing. And of course, the entire merchandise chain has been expanded for us to support these uniforms and support this second identity. It just becomes who you are.”
As much as these white jerseys have meant something to the organization, the past few years have allowed the Heat to experiment and introduce new designs and color schemes. When McCullough gets a new schedule each summer, he begins imagining the rollout campaign for that year’s newest jersey.
The Heat have created some of the most vibrant City Edition jerseys of the last decade. His “Vice City” jersey was a huge hit. The originals were white; Subsequent versions have come in blue greige, fuchsia and black. This season, they wear black jerseys with “Heat Culture” written on the chest.
The latest Heat City Edition uniform is here 🔥
last night – especially @KaseyaCenter – Ticket holders were among the first fans to make a full purchase #HEATCulture Collection.@Miami Heat , @AmericanAir pic.twitter.com/nbH08RmMlT
– Miami Heat (@MiamiHEAT) 2 November 2023
Mostly, they wear them at home. The Heat are programmed to wear those City Edition jerseys 19 times in Miami and only once on the road. Their association uniform – or as it was known as the Home Whites – would be worn 24 times on the road.
McCullough wants to make sure the City Edition uniforms get enough presence to connect with Heat fans in Miami. He wants the Heat to wear them during the holidays when fans go shopping. He wants to create a conducive environment to showcase them and create affinity towards them.
“You get this whole story woven around this special uniform that you can only do at home,” he said. “You can’t do that on the street.”
The Heat could create an entire campaign around wearing their latest jerseys at home. They unveiled an alternate court to match their Vice City jerseys in 2018–19 and have had one each season since then. If the game is in Miami, the franchise can choose when to wear the jerseys so they can prioritize the right days.
Vice City Design became its own kind of brand for the franchise. The Heat’s license plate in Vice City colors is the second-best-selling plate in the state, McCullough said, and tops all professional sports teams in Florida.
The 5th and final VICE uniform. #vice versa @Miami Heat , @AmericanAir pic.twitter.com/cMju7UEtV3
– Miami Heat (@MiamiHEAT) 1 December 2020
“You look at any beat up car in South Florida – and you know there are a lot of beat up cars out there – and they all have heat plates on them,” he said. “That’s an absolutely nice looking plate. I’m sure a lot of those plates don’t have heat fans. It’s just a bad looking license plate to put on your car.
This marks a successful effort for the Heat. Planning runs throughout the organization. McCullough surveils Pimental and considers him an unofficial member of the marketing staff. Any similar decisions are governed by him.
Pimentel’s work is huge. Whenever the Heat choose their road jersey, they must consider how it will impact travel. New possibilities led him to relearn how to pack for trips after Nike took over in 2017.
For each road trip, the Heat bring a game set of each uniform and a backup set, as well as some blanks; That means 40-45 uniforms in each colour. If they intend to wear two different uniforms on a trip, they can bring about 90 different sets.
Then there’s everything else: warmups, sneakers, tights, socks, practice gear. In total, Pimental said his team and training staff bring about 3,000 pounds of equipment on road trips.
He calls it “a traveling circus”. It’s a far cry from his early days in Sacramento, but he doesn’t lack for simplicity.
“Sure, there might (be) times when you get frustrated, but I think it’s a good thing to have a little more recognition,” he said. “I don’t think there is anything wrong with it. Habits change, things change. You never know if you’ll be back home in a white uniform. It’s nice to see different things.
“Earlier, you saw only white uniforms at home. “Now you will get a chance to see all of our uniforms.”
The NBA is not the only league to abandon the home white jersey as its core principle. The NHL franchises flopped during the league’s history and began wearing their black sweaters at home again during the 2003–04 season. The NFL lets the home team decide its own uniforms, and those teams rarely choose white anymore. Even the Los Angeles Lakers did not wear white at home until the early 2000s.
NBA teams began pushing alternative jerseys at home about a decade before Nike took over. Arena believes that as of 2017, teams wore their white jerseys at home about 75 percent of the time.
Now, this is very little. The same old rules and expectations no longer apply. Arena does not see this as a wholesale abandonment of league norms.
“It was already being destroyed,” he said. “We just put a paradigm around it. And then, through decay, it is assumed that what it was was somewhat complete, like a statue, and it was decaying into something imperfect. I would argue that it was on its way to being flawed, and we have now made it perfect.”
The association’s jerseys are worn at the same frequency this season as they were during the 2017–18 season, Nike’s first year as an apparel distributor, but the division between home and road is clearer. In that first season under Nike teams wore their association jerseys approximately 29 times per season, and played an average of 17 games at home. This season, the association’s jersey appeared an average of 29 times per team, but only about nine times at home.
About 22 percent of all games this season will feature a matchup of two teams wearing one colored jersey. Teams are scheduled to wear the City Edition jerseys approximately 14 times this season, 11 of which will be at home.
Rules made by the league make certain jerseys significant. The Lakers’ gold Icon jersey can be paired with anything, Arena said. Other jerseys – like the yellow of the Indiana Pacers, the orange of the Thunder and the light blue of the Memphis Grizzlies – are also versatile and do not need to be worn only in contrast to white.
The NBA is “more obsessed with this than you can imagine,” Arena said. The uniforms are part of his life’s work and he has been with the league for 26 years.
In that time, the league has undergone drastic changes, changing uniform providers several times and introducing a new set of logos and color schemes. For most of that period, some fundamentals never changed, but wearing the white jersey at home is no longer part of that foundation.
“I don’t know that we ever want to be so entrenched in rules and regulations and tradition and prejudice that we can’t step out and listen to our teams and our fans,” Arena said. “I think what our teams are telling us is that our fans wanted to see these different uniforms at home, and they probably got bored of seeing their team in white every single game for 41 games Were.
“The benefit, I guess you could say, is that they get to see the amazing colors of 29 other teams. They can see the purple of the Lakers and the green of the Celtics, etc. But they never get to see their team on their home field.” I didn’t get a chance to see him playing in his colors, which is an incredible dynamic to watch.”
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(Top photo of Jimmy Butler: Issac Baldizzon/NBAE via Getty Images)
