It appears that the Denver Nuggets 2023-2024 City Edition jersey may have leaked in the wee hours of the night. While not confirmed, all cases seem to point to below being the 4th jersey in Denver’s set this season.

Consider yours truly thoroughly unimpressed. Last week in my Three Takes from Three Nuggets Eras article I brought up how the black rainbow jerseys are overrated. The entire crux of my argument is that black isn’t even part of the Nuggets color scheme and that Nike essentially is just lazy with their design process and slaps stuff on black jerseys for teams across the league and calls it a day. Now, even though I didn’t think the rainbows were amazing like many, I was fine with them. The rainbow jersey is of course iconic and the black rainbows (or their much cleaner predecessor the white rainbows from the year before) leaned into that nostalgia. This thing though? Garbage. I mean, seriously, how much thought got put into this? It’s like Nike said “hey, it’s been three years, time to slap another black Nuggets jersey together so take the top half of the rainbow jersey, chuck 5280 on there since everyone knows Denver is a mile high and, I don’t know, maybe put some mountains or something in the background. Colorado has mountains. Cool, book it. Let’s all laugh about it over a martini lunch. Profit.”

It is what it is though and despite the blatant laziness in the design, it still beats red or yellow skylines. The calls seem to be growing louder about people’s distaste for the Nike designs and I think many of us are noticing the canned nature of them and ultimately what just seems to amount to low effort. I absolutely applaud Nike for driving the city jersey concept in general. Getting a new jersey every year that drops weeks or days before the season starts is fun, but the risk you run, and one that I think they are experiencing, is producing so many jersey designs at once lends itself to repetitiveness and simplicity. Hopefully with the Nike deal expiring at the end of the 24-25 season we’ll either get a new company making NBA jersey designs or the potential of losing the deal will light a fire under Nike to do better.