The Magic Have A New Space Themed Alternate But It Falls Flat

The Magic have one of the best uniform histories in the NBA. The pinstripe sets they wore in the 90’s were iconic and the star infused jerseys they wore in the early 00’s were unique and beautiful. Ever since though they’ve struggled to create a standout jersey or one that really sets them apart from the rest of the NBA. Their current main set is fine, but there’s nothing about them that stands out from the average design.

With the City uniforms, the Magic had a chance to really create something unique, different, and use a white, blue, and black color scheme that has done them wonders in the past. Unfortunately, they completely and totally failed and have created what can best be described as rec league uniforms.

Let’s start with the positives because despite problems there is a lot of good here. The City theme is supposed to be related to the space program in Cape Canaveral. The city of Orlando played a big part in supporting the growth of NASA and still plays a part today as more companies, such as SpaceX get involved. The space themed side panels look really cool and is the best part of the jersey. Last year these same jerseys fell a little flat when they tried to push that design through the entire jersey. Making it more subtle and only using it on the side panel was a great call. Using a blue trimming on the side to contrast against the overwhelming amount of black is also a great call.

Now let’s get to the problems. The chrome logo. This needs to go away. It doesn’t look good and it’s just plastered on the front as the main piece. The Magic logo already doesn’t sit well on the front of a jersey, but the chrome takes an already boring color scheme and makes it worse. What Nike should have done was gone with a blue font and ditched the logo. The blue would have contrasted the overwhelming black that’s in this jersey in a positive way. The chrome just helps make it dull. It’s very rare that using a logo on the front of a jersey works and this doesn’t.

The number placement is terrible. It just looks weird and doesn’t compliment the jersey at all. It almost looks like they threw the logo on to the front, realized there was too much empty space (pun not intended) on the front and so they threw a number in there for good measure. It’s bad. Throw out the chrome logo, place the number in a normal spot, and add a font to the front instead. That would have created some decent, maybe even great, jerseys. Instead it just all comes off flat and boring.