Inspired by the borough. Built for the borough.
— Brooklyn Nets (@BrooklynNets) September 23, 2019
Introducing our first fully redesigned court of the Brooklyn era 🎥 pic.twitter.com/NKilJhu9u0
On Monday morning, the Brooklyn Nets introduced a new basketball court design for the first time since moving from New Jersey to the Barclays Center in 2012. Brooklyn’s new court will be the NBA’s first all-gray court.
The redesigned court features a “weathered wood and concrete gray” look to represent the playground courts throughout Brooklyn and the borough’s “industrial vibe”. The Nets switched the mid-court logo to their partial logo (the “B” basketball logo), which doesn’t have any city or state text.
The baselines display “Brooklyn Nets” in a subway signage inspired typeface, which the Nets were determined to rectify after moving away from the mosaic-style lettering in the wordmarks last season. A subway tile pattern runs across the apron of the court to complete the subway-style look.Â
“The subway design really resonated,” says Jeff Gamble, the Nets’ vice president of content and creative. “We got a couple of eyebrow raises [over moving away from it]. We nodded along at that. We felt like we had made a change for the sake of change. We could have handled it better.”
The new court will still feature the herringbone pattern, which the Nets have had since they moved to Brooklyn.
“There was some impetus to refresh things but also some hesitation,” says Gamble. “We were nervous about messing it up. We have seen court designs that have fallen on their face.”
According to an article by ESPN’s Zach Lowe, getting the right shade of gray took some tweaking. The new court had to be dark enough to come across as gray on television, but not too dark to take away from the viewing experience. The first stain they tried out during a test broadcast appeared too light so the team and league agreed that the court shade of gray should be darker.
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Lowe also mentioned the Nets discussed inverting the two-tone look with light gray in the pant and a darker gray surrounding it. But the two-tone gray court would have made the arena too dark. “Barclays is dark anyway,” Nets’ general manager Sean Marks says. “I wanted this to be brighter without using super bright colors. This is simple, to the point.”
The Nets also discussed having black subway tiles on top of white sidelines and baselines but the league said that white doesn’t work well on television.
Lowe also snuck in the article that the Nets will be bringing back The Notorious B.I.G.-inspired city edition uniforms, but that will be white instead of black this season.