Do I love the Mavericks? Yes. I think I have proven that on this website and in the pages of D Magazine and elsewhere. There is, however, one thing I don’t super love, especially lately, and that is their overall branding and, specifically, their uniforms. The main home and road sets were never that great (and not unique, basically the same as the old Charlotte Bobcats jerseys). At their very best, they were competent. Now they look dated; they do not have a timeless aesthetic worth hanging onto, desperately it seems.
With the team building around 20-year-old Luka Doncic, and fully in a new era after the retirement [stares into the middle distance for 25 minutes] of Dirk Nowitzki, it is time for a change, a professional brand refresh from logo to color scheme to uniforms. I can only hope it is coming for next season. Nothing can be done right now, unfortunately.
In addition to its home and road unis, the Mavs have played in a new dark blue incredibly plain-looking set that, if you are being kind, looks like a well-made practice uniform. And last night, another set leaked. You see it here. I believe these are the City edition and I think they are inspired by Deep Ellum(??). There were hints this was coming, when the matching court design was glimpsed prior to the season. But I guess I wasn’t fully prepared for my reaction to these. It brings me no pleasure to do this, but I have a few thoughts:
- The font for the wordmark is not great but passable. A decent execution of a kind of OK but certainly not original (the Nets have something similar this season) idea. But the font for the numbers is unreadable. It looks like the numbers at the bottom of a check.
- Overall, it looks like the team’s new creative director is named Chad Mountaindew.
- It looks like the team has signed a deal to play eight home games in a Mesquite Walmart in 1995.
- It looks like when a white kid on Step by Step or some other sitcom in ABC’s TGIF lineup would dress as a rapper for one episode to show up a bully or something and then would rap, “My name is Jason and I’m here to say / I like school in a major way” and everyone would be blown away.
- It looks like it was literally designed by the faceless, shirtless And1 guy.
- Being generous, it looks like bootleg Fresh Prince of Bel Air merch.
- It looks like the graffiti mural a developer commissions for an apartment complex — built over a place where people once did actual graffiti — to give it “an urban vibe.”
- Did I doodle this on my algebra 1 book cover? No, like everyone else, I did this. But maybe also this.
- Basically: if Macaulay Culkin from the “Black or White” video were a jersey.
- We are now on a three-year streak of bad City editions.
