Utah Jazz: The purple mountain unis may be coming back (and that’s awesome)
By Ryan Aston
The Utah Jazz are rumored to be introducing a new throwback uniform next season. If you’re a fan of their ’90s NBA Finals teams, you’re going to like it.
It may not be a Mike Conley trade on draft day or a Bojan Bogdanovic signing out of nowhere, but Utah Jazz fans may have just gotten the best news they’ll see for the rest of the offseason. Especially if you’re nostalgiac for the Stockton-to-Malone glory days of the mid and late ’90s.
The rumor mill was churning in a big, bad way over the weekend about the introduction of a new (old?) throwback uniform the team could be adding to its slate of jerseys for the 2019-20 season. Better yet: the unis would come with an accompanying court at Vivint Arena, much as the gradient City Edition kits have for the last two seasons.
Alright, no more burying the lede — per a pair of reliable sources, the purple mountain look that the Jazz sported during the 1997 and ’98 NBA Finals seasons will be among Utah’s unis next season.
The rumored return of the Jazz’s radical old look was first reported on via Twitter by our friend Riley Gisseman of Salt City Hoops and the Utah Jazz subreddit on Friday. He mentioned both the jerseys and the alternate court.
His story was seemingly corroborated by JazzNationNews (another must-follow for Jazz fans on Twitter and Facebook), who shared pictures of a hardwood floor being painted to resemble what fans saw at the Delta Center during the height of Jazz basketball.
https://twitter.com/JazzNationNews/status/1157522337043906560
No official announcement has been made by the team, but this is one case where all the smoke seems to be the direct result of actual fire. And, make no mistake about it, the purple uniforms were fire.
The old mountain logo is absolutely a product of its time, and other uniforms the Jazz wore under that banner may leave something to be desired in the style department — the move back to the J-Note logo and unis was the right one — but as a throwback special, the late ’90s purple roadies strike all the right chords.
And with the Jazz likely having their best shot at an NBA title since those Finals runs against Michael Jordan and a pair of historic Chicago Bulls squads, what better time than now to resurrect the look?
I’m raising the roof like Chris Morris at the very thought of it.