Add some interest to warm-up gear

Lakers warm-up gear

Adidas stripes and generic designs haven’t plagued NBA uniforms. Instead, those burdens are carried by the warm-up gear. While it’s nice that the unis are untainted, superior tracksuits are worth wishing for.

Warm-up gear is an opportunity for creativity in a spot where it belongs. The clothing must still be functional, but there’s more room for design error with warm-ups than uniforms.

Tracksuits and shooting shirts aren’t worn during the fundamental moments for a team, the actual games, and thus aren’t as essential as uniforms. A few more risks can be taken. But the warm-up gear is still on the periphery of games – worn in pre-game layup lines and on the bench, flung to the floor at the scorers’ table when checking in – and thus is still important.

That’s why it’s disappointing that NBA teams are stuck with three-striped template gear. The problem is twofold.

The three stripes and Adidas logo are prominent on the current warm-up gear. The result is the sense that it’s an Adidas jacket featuring the Dallas Mavericks’ colours and logo, for instance, instead of Dallas’s own gear.

Secondly, the clothing is largely the same for all the teams. Aside from the aforementioned Adidas issues, the warm-ups generally look pretty good, but it’s sterile and boring when they’re all similar.

Collared shooting shirts, striping on cuffs for jackets, plain fronts or backs for jackets and word marks on pant legs all mark examples of missed opportunities.

If the need for league-wide warm-up uniformity were banished, teams could utilize those opportunities and create unique, team-specific garb. There’d likely be some unattractive results, but it’d be superior to the uninspired gear seen currently.