NBA Bans Cream-Colored Attire Due To Its Effect On TV Screens

The NBA has a rather strict dress code, but perhaps none of it can hold up to a new rule it has added to the jersey department: no cream-colored uniforms allowed.

The basketball league had planned to make a behind-the-back pass with this odd regulation, hoping it would fadeaway. However, its secret couldn’t go over the heads of fans any longer when the Milwaukee Bucks showed off their new blue City uniform last week.

Milwaukee, after all, is also known as the Cream City, named for its iconic building with bricks crafted from clay around the city—hence the off-white detailing on the kits from 2017 through 2020.

“We aren’t allowed to do cream-colored jerseys anymore,” the Bucks’ chief marketing officer Dustin Godsey shared on Twitter, after receiving an avalanche of questions from puzzled audience members. “There are reasons, but… it won’t appease anyone to get into it: so I’ll just say: we would if we could.”

However, Paul Lukas,  journalist and founder of sports uniform-focused site Uni Watch, is friends with Godsey, and he probed further. After some reservations, Godsey revealed that the NBA has banned the color from the arena for the way it gives digital advertisements a “pixelation effect.”

When sporting events returned from the pandemic, they seized the opportunity to digitally beam advertisements onto courts. Apparently, cream uniforms disrupt some of these brand placements.

In the same way that wearing green can cause your outfit to merge with a green screen, off-white attire would sometimes get confused for the pale wooden flooring being edited out for advertising.

While the glitch wasn’t noticeable enough to go viral, Godsey said it bothered partnering brands of the Bucks and those of their opponents enough for them to sound it out.

He was right to say the reason wouldn’t please most people. The move is, as they say, cramping one’s style.

Just because I’ve seen it a bunch today: we aren’t allowed to do cream colored jerseys anymore. There are reasons, but suffice it to say it won’t appease anyone to get into it, so I’ll just say: we would if we could.

— Dustin Godsey (@dgodz) November 11, 2022

[via Gizmodo and Paul Lukas, cover photo 11838253 © Aprescindere | Dreamstime.com]