Is There A Sacramento Kings Rebrand Coming?
By Ti Windisch
After teasing us with a tweet featuring them on Thursday the Sacramento Kings officially announced that the baby blue Kings uniforms used from 1985-1990 will be making a comeback this season for a total of ten home games. Fans watching the Kings will see the baby blues on all nine Flashback Friday (it’s a hashtag, but I completely refuse to type hashtags in articles) home games and on the last home game played in Sleep Train Arena against the Thunder on April 9th.
More from Kings News
- 3 Ways Chris Duarte improves the Kings chances in 2023-24
- Bleacher Report crazily lists Kings’ All-Star as “most overrated NBA player”
- Kings and Heat fans clash on Twitter to debate All-Star players
- Sacramento Kings’ Chris Duarte playing in 2023 FIBA World Cup
- 3 Young players the Kings must develop, 2 to give up on
I like the idea, and the uniforms. They’re distinctive and will almost certainly sell like hotcakes, meaning Sacramento should be seeing a lot of pretty baby blue on Kings home games, even the ones not happening on Fridays. I just wish the Kings would expand their rebranding to the entire logo and uniforms.
The current Kings uniforms aren’t terrible, but unless you’re a legendary, historic franchise (see: Bulls, Lakers, Celtics) then you need to rebrand every once in a while. Especially if a new era of winning basketball is supposedly about to begin.
As weird as it seems, changing uniforms can be a big step in changing culture. It dissociates the team from the previous squads who were bad by essentially changing the team along with the uniforms. The Milwaukee Bucks are a good example of this.
They’d been bad in red and green for several seasons, so this season along with new ownership settling in and new young talent on the floor the Bucks got themselves a set of new logos, new colors and of course new uniforms. And if you ask me (a Bucks fan, but still) they’re pretty damn sharp.
Who knows how the change will play out for Milwaukee, but fan interest around the Bucks hasn’t been higher in literally decades, and the new green and cream gear is all over the city. I know very well that diehard Kings fans have been paying attention and supporting the team through all the struggle, but embracing the more fair-weather fans helps attendance and the whole atmosphere around the organization.
As far as what the new Kings brand should look like, don’t ask me. I’m a writer, and definitely not a graphic designer. Luckily Addison Foote is a graphic designer, and he’s already done a mock-up of a different Kings logo. It’s awesome. Foote did one of these for every team, if you like the Kings one you’ll probably enjoy the rest of them too!
Kings Redesigned Logo, by Addison Foote.
The royal lion is dope, and as Foote notes in the description for the logo it matches the Kings mascot Slamson. I like the fact that he kept the Kings colors, because nobody else in the NBA uses purple these days, and it looks sharp. But the current logo is boring, and it doesn’t have a storied past that makes it boring in a cool way. It’s just boring.
So whether it’s something with a new emphasis on Slamson like Addison Foote made or a different logo concept all-together, I would definitely be all for a new Sacramento Kings logo, and some new uniforms to go with them. Right now they look kind of like a quickly-made NBA 2K custom uniform. We can do better, Sacramento.
More from A Royal Pain
- 3 Ways Chris Duarte improves the Kings chances in 2023-24
- 5 Players the Sacramento Kings never should have signed
- Bleacher Report crazily lists Kings’ All-Star as “most overrated NBA player”
- Kings and Heat fans clash on Twitter to debate All-Star players
- Sacramento Kings’ Chris Duarte playing in 2023 FIBA World Cup