Ranking and analyzing all 30 NBA City edition uniforms
21. Brooklyn Nets
For whatever reason, the Nets chose plain black and white as their color scheme when they relocated to Brooklyn from New Jersey in 2012. They needed a change at the time from the outdated ‘90s-style look they were rocking, but straight black and white was mistake. The LA Kings are the only other team in major American sports that uses it, and they manage to somewhat pull it off, although they could be doing a lot better.
To make it work, they’d either have to use gray as a secondary color or use some unique design element that makes it stand out. The Spurs have the former domain, and the latter, to their credit, was cautiously used on their Statement edition jerseys. But they’ve stuck to the “our jerseys are simple, so they’re slick and clever” ideology, which can sometimes work, if you have a good enough color scheme and you do the simple things right. Brooklyn did not do that.
Their regular set is not offensively bad — far from it, actually — but there is very little going on. Sticking to that boring philosophy, both of their alternate uniforms are black, and essentially variations of their away uni. The Statement pulls it off well enough. The City edition does not.
Arched lettering can work somewhat well at times, but it does not here, for obvious reasons: The letters extend too far. It doesn’t make sense to try that. It makes even less sense to include those horrid side panels, which appear almost on the front of the jersey. They were designed very, very badly.
Just go gray and black!