The NBA announced Monday that the four surviving ABA franchises will wear ABA-inspired Classic Edition uniforms this season, with matching Classic Courts, marking 50 years since the 1976 merger.
The Brooklyn Nets, Denver Nuggets, Indiana Pacers and San Antonio Spurs are the four. They are the only four. Everything else from that league is gone.
Denver Is the Headline
The Nuggets are swapping navy and gold for orange. That is not a tweak. That is the single best color decision any NBA team has made in a decade.
Denver’s current palette is fine. It is also indistinguishable from half the league. The rainbow-skyline era produced the most recognizable uniform in basketball history, and the organization has spent years dancing around it with partial throwbacks instead of committing.
Going orange is committing.
What the Others Are Doing
Brooklyn built its rollout around the slogan “A Classic, Reborn in Brooklyn,” with the jersey going on sale October 19. The franchise started as the New Jersey Americans and then the New York Nets, won two ABA titles with Julius Erving, and then sold him to Philadelphia to pay the merger fee. There is a lot of history to reach back into.
San Antonio framed its version as honoring “ABA roots that helped shape our team and city,” which is true in a way that is easy to forget. The Spurs were the Dallas Chaparrals before moving in 1973, and they are the ABA team that most completely became an NBA institution.
Indiana was the ABA’s best franchise, with three championships. The Pacers are the one team whose ABA identity never really stopped being their identity.
The league did not announce how many games each team will wear the uniforms.
Why This Matters More Than a Merchandise Drop
The ABA is the most consequential defunct league in American sports. The three-point line came from it. The slam dunk contest came from it. The red, white and blue ball is still the most instantly recognizable object in basketball marketing, and the NBA did not invent it.
Four teams joined in 1976 and paid for the privilege. The Kentucky Colonels and the Spirits of St. Louis folded, and the Spirits owners negotiated a television revenue share that paid out for decades and became one of the great deals in sports business history.
Honoring that with uniforms is a small gesture. It is still the right one, and it is overdue at 50 years.
The Rest of the League’s Look
Houston and Minnesota have new uniforms this season. The NBA Cup final moves to Hinkle Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, with semifinals held at the higher seed’s home arena, which is a smart idea the league should have had sooner.
No league or player quotes accompanied the uniform release. None were needed. Put Denver in orange and the announcement makes itself.
The season opens October 20.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.