NBA Jersey Week: the best and worst Mavs uniforms

It’s NBA Jersey Week here at SB Nation, and so here I am once again. Not to discuss basketball or players or owners, but clothes. Specifically, uniforms. Color schemes and jersey designs and all the most fun things about sports.

For those of you who have been around Mavs Moneyball for a more than a few years, you might remember when I wrote about the full history of the uniforms worn by your Dallas Mavericks. In the years since, the Mavs haven’t added a single new uniform, so I haven’t felt any reason to pen a follow up piece.*

* I believe the switch to Nike will result in a single new uniform for Dallas, but it has yet to be revealed.

But in honor of Jersey Week, I thought I would talk just a bit about the best jerseys the Mavs have worn over the years. Though I should warn you, the pickins are a bit slim. Dallas has worn two home uniforms and four away uniforms in their history, along with five alternate uniforms. I’ll point out what I consider to be the four best of that group of 11.

All three iterations of the “Diddy uniforms”

These are easily the most fun uniforms Dallas has ever worn. The first iteration was allegedly created by Sean Combs in 2004:

For a lot of Mavs fans, these are their favorites. Everyone loves the Mavs in green, but these had a more modern, flashy appeal than the old green away unis with the western font. I’ve always been pretty up front that these are too busy, with green, light blue, navy, white, and a couple of instances of silver mixed in. But dammit if they weren’t so much fun, and they worked for the mid-2000s powerhouse Mavs.

After five seasons, the Mavs replaced these with a modified, blue version:

As much as I love green, I thought this was an upgrade. It was a bit more streamlined, and the silver numbers really popped over the white “Mavs” font. It was also the first time Dallas had ever worn this lighter shade of blue as the primary color on a uniform. It looked so good that they eventually made that color their primary, but more on that later.

The blue iteration was little more than a transition uniform, as the Mavs updated the format once again in 2010:

To me, the final version was the best. The whole thing just looks better with the number under the wordmark, rather than above it. I loved these uniforms. If only they could’ve been green....

Retro Green

For more than a decade, the expansion Mavs wore these rustic green beauties on the road:

The Mavs kept green as an accent through the 90s, but blue has been their primary color since 1993. Personally, I don’t love the western fonts or the M with a cowboy hat logo, but this shade of green and blue together is simply exquisite.

It sure is a shame that when the Mavs brought these back as a retro throwback in 2016, they only kept them around for a single season:

The championship blues

In 2010, Dallas flipped the coloring of their navy road uniforms and their blue alternates, and it was a great decision. These new road unis were a major upgrade over the drab navy of the 2000s:

Photo by Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images

These will always have a special place in my heart. These are the uniforms Dirk, JET, and the Mavs wore when they won Game 6 of the 2011 NBA Finals. They aren’t the most inspired uniforms. I love this shade of blue, but they are fairly basic, 2000s-styled basketball uniforms. Nothing terrible, but nothing special, save for their sentimental value.

Maybe after Dirk retires, we’ll finally get a much needed update.

As long as we’re discussing the best unis, why not shout out the worst? Certainly none of our loyal readership will need me to specifically name the, erm, trash uniform the Mavs briefly wore in 2003. Oh fine, let’s revel in the awfulness:

The Trashbags

Photo by Jeff Gross/Getty Images

These were so wonderfully craptastic, weren’t they? “Mavericks” looks terrible rendered in that font and shrunk down so it will fit straight across a jersey. I have no idea what this shimmery fabric is, but I can’t imagine it belongs on a basketball uniforms. And while we’re at it, these aren’t even silver. They’re a dull gray, and everything but the awful “Mavericks” wordmark just sort of blends in with it. These were truly terrible, and none of us will ever forget them.