What’s in a name: No ‘Jersey’ on New Jersey’s new jerseys
The overused adage is that it’s not the name on the back of the jersey that matters, but the one on the front.
The good folks of New Jersey certainly agree with this, but I remain unconvinced.
Citizens of the Garden State are up in arms about the Nets’ decision to remove the “New Jersey” from the front of their road uniforms starting in the upcoming season. Most assume this is another in series of moves designed to distance the team from East Rutherford and get one step closer to moving to Brooklyn. State legislature has even proposed taxing (read: punishing) professional franchises in Jersey that don’t have the state name on the uniforms. Even the Nets’ NHL brethren, the Devils, have publicly wagged its finger at the franchise.
That the Nets’ heading out the door (or desperately trying to) is hurtful is one thing, but declaring a war over a jersey is quite another. It’s like picking a fight with an ‘ex’ just so you can have some sort of interaction. It’s demeaning and won’t change anything in the long run.
Not only is it demeaning, but the state is not shy about showing how sore this whole stuation makes them.
Last season 14 of the 30 NBA teams’ main road uniforms had the team name on them and 16 had the teams’ city or state on it. So it isn’t as if New Jersey is flying in the face of a professional norm either with this switch. In fact, the New Jersey Nets have already tried displaying only the team name on the front of their road jersey between 1990-97.
No one in Portland is complaining that the Trailblazers will introduce alternate home uniforms next season that will have neither “Portland” nor “Trailblazers” on them, but rather the city’s pet name: “Rip City.” What about the San Francisco Warriors fans who, throughout most of the 60s, had to endure being known as “The City” Warriors? Then there was the Timberwolves from 1989-1996: not only did the Timberwolves not display “Minnesota” on its uniforms, but the franchise failed to display the full team name. For eight years, Minnesota’s basketball team was just a hodgepodge collection of random lupines, not the proud deciduous tree-dwelling wolves they are today. I could go on … in fact I will go on. Phoenix’s current alternate road unis can’t be bothered to spell out the city’s name (“PHX”). And let’s not forget about the NBA’s Latin Night jerseys from last season. First of all, it’s the Mavericks, not Mavs and I don’t believe “Los Mav” or “El Heat” were translated properly.
See? It could be worse New Jersey, you could have been “Los Nets.” I’m pretty sure you don’t want anything that sounds like “loss” juxtaposed right next to the franchise name. And I hate to point this out, but if your team went the same way as Portland, you might have been nicknamed the “Brick City” Nets (that’s Newark, but close enough). I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t want “brick” contextually mingled in with your franchise name either.
Really what you should be doing is convincing East Rutherford to nickname itself “Champ City.” Either that or start looking for the quickest route to Brooklyn without driving through the Lincoln Tunnel, because everything else is just a sad waste of time.
________________________
Photos courtesy of Flickr
Leave a Reply
