Despite winning eight points against the Atlanta Hawks until the break on Friday, the Oklahoma City Thunder made a drastic adjustment in the second half: they completely changed their uniform.
Due to a breakdown in the uniform selection and approval process, the Thunder and Hawks played the first half with extremely similar colors, the Hawks with the red “icon” uniforms and the Thunder with the alternate orange “supplements”. .
On TV, the combination was especially bad.
The league requested the shirt change, a Thunder spokesman said. The Hawks only wore the red “icon” jerseys on their road trip, so the Thunder made the switch to white during the second half.
With teams that have multiple combinations and alternatives to dress, and no longer observe the traditional standards of home white and road color, the process of uniform selection is done before the season throughout the schedule by a input system called LockerVision. The local team chooses first, then the road team.
The league reviews and approves all combinations, but Thunder and Hawks went through the approval process incorrectly, according to a league spokesman.
Usually, when there are close contrasts like the red-orange problem with OKC and Atlanta, the league catches it and corrects it before it happens. According to a league source, this is the first time in more than 4,000 games that it has happened since the system was introduced.
There have been other notable malfunctions in the basketball wardrobe, such as the Argentine women’s women’s team that lost a game at the 2019 Pan American Games because their players wore the wrong jerseys. On NIGHT 2002, both Syracuse and South Carolina appeared in white uniforms, with Syracuse changing into the first half and orange tops and white shorts.