Despite the Atlanta Hawks’ lead by eight points at halftime, the Oklahoma City Thunder made a drastic adjustment in the second half: they changed from uniform.
Due to an outline of the uniform selection and approval process, the Thunder and Hawks play the first half with extremely similar colors, the Hawks in their red “icon” uniforms and the Thunder in their orange “statement” alternates.
On television, the combination was especially bad.
The league is asking to change the jersey, a Thunder spokesman said. The Hawks only had their red “icon” jerseys on their road trip, and the Thunder made the change to white in the second half.
Since teams have several combinations and alternatives to wear, and no longer adhere to the traditional standard of white white and road color, the uniform pre-season selection process is done for the entire schedule using the input system called LockerVision. The home team chooses first, then the road team.
According to a league spokesman, the league checked and approved all combinations, but the Thunder and Hawks slipped wrong through the approval process.
Usually, if there are now contrasts like the red-orange problem with OKC and Atlanta, the league will catch it and fix it before it happens. According to a league source, this is the first time in more than 4,000 matches that this has happened since the system was introduced.
There were also other notable malfunctions in the basketball uniform, such as the Argentina women’s team that forfeited a match in the 2019 Pan Am Games match because its players wore the wrong jerseys. In the 2002 NIT, both Syracuse and South Carolina showed up in white uniforms, while Syracuse changed in the first half, wearing orange tops and white shorts.