Despite leading the Atlanta Hawks by eight points until the break on Friday night, the Oklahoma City Thunder made a drastic adjustment in the second half: they completely changed their uniforms.
Due to a failure in the uniform selection and approval process, Thunder and Hawks played the first half wearing extremely similar colors, Hawks in their red uniforms “icons” and Thunder in the alternative “statement” orange.
On TV, the combination was particularly bad.
“It seemed strange at first, but it didn’t have much of an effect once we got into the first half,” said Thunder goalkeeper Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. “It wasn’t too much, but I think it made it a little easier for our peripherals and something like that in the second half. But other than that, it was great.”
The league has requested a change of jersey, a Thunder spokesman said. The Hawks only had their red “icon” T-shirts on their trip, so the Thunder made the change to white for the second half.
Both coaches, Thunder’s Mark Daigneault and Hawks’ Lloyd Pierce, said they did not really notice the uniform resemblance in the first half.
“I certainly didn’t notice him and I didn’t even think about it, to be honest with you, then it was a league mandate that I just reacted to,” Daigneault said. “They made me aware of this at the break when I went into the locker room that the boys were in white uniforms, then I went out and played the second half.”
With teams that have more combinations and alternatives to wear and no longer meet the traditional standard of white at home and the color of the road, the process of uniform selection is done before the season for the entire program using an input system called LockerVision. The host team chooses first, then the road team.
The league double-checked all the combinations and approved them, but Thunder and Hawks went through the approval process wrong, according to a league spokesman.
Usually, when there are close contrasts, such as the red-orange issue with OKC and Atlanta, the league catches it and corrects it before the match happens. According to a source in the league, this is the first time in more than 4,000 games that has happened since the system was introduced in 2017-18.
There were other notable failures of the basketball wardrobe, such as the Argentine women’s national team that lost a game in the 2019 Pan Am Games because its players wore the wrong jerseys. In the 2002 men’s NIT, both Syracuse and South Carolina appeared wearing white uniforms, with Syracuse changing into the first half and wearing orange blouses and white shorts.
The change did not affect Thunder, who led 63-55 in the half and won 118-109.