"It was the right moment, the right team," said Lawrence Norman, Adidas' vice president of global basketball. "Even more important, the right city. When you launch something as innovative as this -- that will change the way the players look on the court and the way the fans support the team forever -- why not launch it in the most innovative part of the United States?"
The new jersey is much less a T-shirt than the next phase in the evolution of basketball apparel.
It's being called the "adizero NBA short sleeve uniform system." And Adidas boasts it as a revolutionary marriage between performance and aesthetics.
The uniforms are
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26 percent lighter than their traditional counterparts, which Adidas said its research revealed was most important to players. They come with the ever-popular moisture-absorbing feature. The sleeves are made with stretch fabric that wraps 360 degrees around the shoulder to ensure full range of motion, because anyone who has played basketball knows how a T-shirt's sleeve can interfere with a jumper.