NBA unveils clean All-Star design

— -- For the past generation, all-star uniforms across most sports have been gaudy, flashy and overdesigned. It's easy to understand why: An all-star game is a glamour event, and the uniforms will only be worn for a few hours, so you want to make a strong impression -- even if, as has often been the case, it's strongly negative.

But the NBA has flipped the script with its uniforms for the upcoming 2015 All-Star Game, which will be played Feb. 15 at Madison Square Garden in New York. So long, gaudy. Hello, old school.

The minimalist jersey designs, with nothing but a number on the front, are supposed to pay tribute to the style of basketball played on New York City blacktops, but they really evoke the feel of basketball from the 1930s and '40s, when many pro and amateur teams just wore numbers on their chests. Some fans may find the designs too spare, but they're a big hit here at Uni Watch HQ. And whether you love them or hate them, you have to agree that NBA and Adidas have come up with something genuinely surprising and unexpected here -- good for them.

The biggest design risk they've taken is that the jerseys don't carry the "East" and "West" conference designations. There was probably a lot of back and forth on this point, but they made the right call. The simplicity of having one team in black and the other in white is all that's needed here. Anyone who cares about the NBA knows which player is in which conference; any casual fan tuning in doesn't care about conferences. Kudos to all involved for having the guts to go this route. (NBA uniform history is poorly documented and notoriously spotty, so the last time the league's All-Star jerseys didn't carry the conference names isn't clear, although the league says it was sometime in the 1960s.)