San Antonio Spurs Revive Fiesta Colors With New City Edition Uniforms

During the late 1980s and all the way into the early 2000s, the San Antonio Spurs had a very curious visual identity. Starting in 1989, the team’s primary logo consisted of the team’s black-and-silver wordmark logo in front of three swipes of teal, pink, and orange Fiesta-colored paint. The color was present on the logo, the team’s court design at the Alamodome and on the team’s warmups as well. The Fiesta colors were present nearly everywhere but on the team’s uniforms, which remained mostly black, silver and white.

It was a strange juxtaposition — the vibrant Fiesta colors were clearly an official part of the team’s visual identity, but still nowhere to be found whenever the actual players were on the court. Once the 2002-03 season rolled around and the Spurs officially moved on from the Fiesta colors, it seemed like those colors were going to be buried in history — destined to become a footnote in what was a decade-long chapter of NBA teams taking wild and ambitious chances with their visual identities during the 1990s.

Fortunately, Nike
NKE
and the NBA’s City edition uniform program are where wild and ambitious ideas go to become feasible. That means that an idea like the Spurs actually wearing their Fiesta colors on their uniforms can finally come to life and become a reality. Sure enough, the Spurs have unveiled their City edition uniforms for the 2020-21 season and if you’re a fan of their Fiesta color scheme then you’re in for a treat with these uniforms.

The design of the uniform is based on the team’s warm-up design from the early 1990s. The diagonal stripes on the jerseys and the vertical stripes on the shorts are identical to how they were placed on the old warmups. In lieu of a Spur logo below the stripes on the jersey, the number has been placed there. The biggest difference between these jerseys and the old warm-up jackets (outside of the Frost Bank logo) is the reinterpretation of the old school “San Antonio” wordmark logo. Instead of being a direct replication, the wordmark has received a bit of a modernization — there’s even a rowel logo dotting the “i” in “San Antonio”.

The uniform is simple but extremely effective. The Fiesta stripes do a wonderful job of popping off of the black background, and the modernized wordmark logo was done perfectly. This particular combo works so well that it’s actually a wonder that the Spurs didn’t go all the way with the Fiesta color scheme and attempt to do something like this with their uniforms during the wild design period of the 1990s. Judging by what other teams looked like during that era, any potential Spurs uniform utilizing the Fiesta colors would’ve been an incredibly busy piece of laundry. Maybe it’s good that this uniform didn’t arrive until design trends were a bit more constrained here in the present-day.

This uniform is likely going to end up being the best of the bunch when it comes to the 2020-21 NBA City edition uniform program. There’s really nothing bad to say about this uniform. It’s not too busy, it’s not too plain, it doesn’t try to veer too far away from the team’s core identity and yet it’s still incredibly unique when compared to the other team’s uniforms. The Spurs haven’t really had too many exciting City edition jerseys since the program got started, so this is their first time really trying something creative. As it turned out, this design ends up passing the eye test with flying, Fiesta colors.