A Disclaimer: I of course recognize that these opinions are wholly my own, that of a relatively casual and late-coming Nuggets fan, and that they concern an ultimately unimportant subject. If you have the time to spare and are interested in conversations about uniforms of sports teams, read on.

The Problem

There are a few ways to increase the population and fervency of a franchise's fandom. The first and most effective is to win consistently. The second is to acquire a star, via the draft, trades, or free agency, which might lead to or at least gesture toward the first. The last, and in fact the easiest for a franchise to achieve, so far as I know, is to look good. There are jerseys out there that can speak to people, even those not interested in sports, and say "Don't you want to watch this? Don't you want to wear this? So what if you have no commitment or connection to the team? Start with me: I am a compelling item of clothing." Maybe I'm more shallow than most, but I can get sucked into rooting for just about any team I know nothing about so long as they look good. Villanova's Nike Aerographic jersey did this to me. I want to wear Gonzaga's black with blue to the park and shoot around. Yeah, I'm from the Inland Northwest, but really I just like the uniform. I dislike Duke but I admit that this is sharp. It's a happy coincidence that I'm a Seahawks fan and I love their jerseys. I don't think we should underestimate image as a way to get new fans involved; kids do it frequently and sometimes grow up still embracing their teams.

The Nuggets jerseys are not compelling. Both the whites and the powder blues are boring. The dark blues (when was the last time they were even worn?) are lazily executed and sport cursive. As an Idaho Vandal, I attest that any cursive is perhaps the second least inspiring script; we have yet to see Comic Sans on the field or floor, I believe. Anyway, the alternate yellow jerseys with the multi-blue rainbow/skyline are the best, and it is no coincidence that they draw on the heritage of the team and the region the most, but I'll point out the problem with this design shortly.

Denver Stiffs, I think most of you agree with me to some extent. Maybe. As of January, when this poll ran, anyway. 62% of 39 respondents answered then that the Nuggets needed new uniforms. Stiffs member Cloudburst posted some designs of his own there and here, and got some positive feedback. Maybe we should make a bigger push.

Please, no more yellow.

I've been attending school of some sort for . . . nigh on 25 straight years now, and strangely I've never attended a school that did not have the colors of black and gold, or silver and gold officially but black and gold in practice. It helps that I attended the same K-12 school for the first 13 years, but the Idaho Vandals and the Colorado Buffaloes happen to be the only Division I teams that I know of who claim silver and gold. Any of you who attended schools which claim gold usually default to yellow for fan attire especially. It's hard to fault, because the materials of t-shirts would look like beige or tan, and yellow is flashier than that. Some schools or teams which claim gold really just wear yellow even in uniforms, like LSU or the Lakers, but the Vandals and the Buffs wear gold on the field and court, and newer fan attire has by and large followed suit.

All of this is, well, not even ancillary to my point: yellow is not a great color for a team. I'll get more specific and leave aside my personal dislike of yellow and its association with cowardice, and argue that yellow is not a great color for the Nuggets. First, the combination of powder blue and yellow is shared by the Chargers, a divisional rival of the Denver Broncos; I know some of you don't care, but I want to wear my blue and yellow Mizunos out and about when I'm in the Nuggets mood, and I don't want people in this football town to think I'm a Chargers fan. Second, yellow is not especially significant in the history of Nuggets jerseys. Third, yellow is oddly popular in the NBA, at least by my reckoning. I checked out all the teams' primary colors, boiled them down to their simplest forms (blue, red, yellow, purple, green, orange), left out white and black, and found that the three primary colors are --- surprise --- the most popular primary colors for teams. Blue is tops, with 18 teams sporting some form (I include Charlotte, because I can't decide what their teal is); red comes second with 13; and yellow third with 9 teams (6 of them in the West) using it in some form or another (leaving out the Sonics, for obvious reasons): the Cavs, Pacers, Nuggets, Warriors, and Lakers have jerseys where the main color is yellow, and the Rockets, Heat, Jazz, and Grizzlies use it as an accent color. Do correct me if I'm wrong; this is really just cursory image searching. Now, red and blue are tried and true colors for sports teams, sports cars, and nations' flags the world over, and the Nuggets themselves use blue. It makes sense for the team as well, mountains and skies and such. But yellow for the Nuggets can only make sense as a bastardized, diluted, vulgar gold. Why not just go all the way? Only three teams use a distinct gold --- that is, not a yellow --- and so far as I can tell, none of them use it as a primary color for jerseys. These teams are the Celtics, the Raptors, and the Pelicans --- I'll come back to them. The Wizards had a mostly-gold jersey which was retired in 2009 (I gather it wasn't popular, but there were other problems with that jersey beyond the color). The Nuggets could be unique in the NBA today.

Go for the Gold!

Now, the execution is crucial but the solution straightforward. Gold without sheen is just tan. Or beige. Typically boring, either way. This is the problem other teams face with fan apparel, as I mentioned above, and maybe teams opt for yellow jerseys simply to promote coherence between fan and team apparel. I'll come back to fan apparel and treat the jersey issue first. I propose something with the same sheen as the Wizards' jersey linked above, or the Notre Dame jerseys, something satiny, and I think that could work with the current yellow alternate, the jersey which embraces the skyline/rainbow heritage of the team. Replace all the yellow with a satin gold, including the line in the rainbow; keep the light blue and dark blue lines and accents. I would like to see a change in the font, but I'll defer to more artistically minded fans for suggestions there. I do like the font used with the old rainbow jerseys, though it doesn't really tie into any mining theme. Anyway, I think this would be dark enough and distinct enough to be a regular away jersey, and I suggest going with a primary gold because dark blue is so popular in the NBA and because the New Orleans Pelicans now have dark blue with red and gold accents for their jerseys; they effectively co-opted the Nuggets' color combination from the '90s.

For the other set of jerseys, I suggest we take advantage of the Nuggets theme again, and use a satiny silver like the Spurs jersey here. Denver Stiffs regular L Sider suggested silver and gold for the Nuggets in a comment here, but seems to dismiss the combo because CU uses it. Do the Buffs really use it at all, much less with any regularity, or does it just default to black and gold? The football team will be revealing new uniforms at the end of this week, but I doubt silver will be prevalent. And even if CU uses silver and gold as more than just a way for campus tour guides to trip up people with simplistic trivia questions, I see that as a merit; it's easier to get into Nuggets spirit if you can conveniently wear your collegiate gear. So, we use a silver base, with the current dark blue for lettering and numbers, perhaps with gold accents; light blue wouldn't show up well on the silver jersey. Alternatively, we could use the blue the Avs do; that would pop well on a silver jersey, I think, and lend a corporate coherence to the Kroenke empire. As for layout, I don't like the lettering or placement on the current white and powder blue jerseys; overall they're utterly uninspired. The designs I favor most in the NBA right now are the Thunder alternates, some Mavs, and others that are clean, simple, coherent, and distinct. I'll admit to liking pinstripes (perhaps residual from my days as a Pacers fan in the Reggie Miller era), but I don't feel they're appropriate for the Nuggets or any team that would like to embrace a "Western" image or a modern image; I'd like to see us somehow wed the two.

On another front, using silver more deliberately as a characteristic color of the team, rather than white as a default, could also help solve the problem with fan apparel: use a light grey base for most cotton clothing, though I could see a tan or beige rendering being popular among a certain sector of Colorado's population. True silver and/or gold could easily work for polyester warm-up type gear. Finally, and tangentially related, I'd suggest using the pick-axe badge more and the mountain-top logo less, unless we rework it somehow. Any ideas out there for a completely new logo?

So what do you think? True gold, silver, and blue as the colors of the Denver Nuggets, an update to the team's image and an end to the afterthought-status of the Nuggets' attire? I invite any and all comments or suggests, and especially renderings or photoshops which talented, bored, or inspired people might work up of this or other designs.