SALT LAKE CITY — Part of the sports fan experience is the notion that anyone can have thoughts, opinions and ideas about how to make their favorite team better.
For example, in NBA circles, fans use online trade machines to assume the role of general manager and create fake trade proposals they feel could improve their squad.
In that same vein, there’s a community of Utah Jazz fans on social media who have taken to using their creative side to come up with new, fresh jersey concepts they think the squad could look good in when they hit the court.
“Ideas are endless. I feel like there’s a lot of things you can do with a lot of different concepts that the Jazz already have. People love seeing new stuff.” — Brendon Nguyen, of Draper
Take Salt Lake City resident Dustin Locke, who is perhaps the newest member of this unofficial club. After about a year of having some ideas for Jazz jersey concepts, the Utah native on March 19 unveiled four designs on Twitter, saying, “Last night I finally put pen to paper on what I’d love to see as the next generation of the @utahjazz. I think it’s time to fully return to our roots.”
His “Association” jersey design is white with a faint but noticeable blue mountain pattern. The word “Utah” is in purple, with copper and that same blue trim. The “Icon” design is essentially an inverse of the Association jersey.
His “Slopes” design is a blue gradient with white and purple trim, with white and purple numbering and the Jazz’s original logo in purple. His final design, which he called “Sand,” notes the prominence of copper in Utah. Somewhat similar to the Jazz’s current “City” jerseys, the bottom of Locke’s design is a horizontal strip of dark copper, and the strips get lighter as you move up, halfway through the jersey.
The rest is white with copper and light blue trim, and in a unique detail, the copper numbering is in the middle of copper outline of the state of Utah.
As of Monday, Locke’s tweet of his designs had 169 replies, 278 retweets and roughly 2,400 “likes.”
“I love the Jazz and I know how to design stuff and I think most people, but designers specifically, you live in the world of trying to fix things or mess with things,” he said. “The mentality is kind of that everything’s broken, and how would you fix it if you could?”
He does see at least one difference between what he did and a trade machine, however.
“It’s like the trade machine except not everyone can use it,” he said of the ability to conceptualize and execute a design. “Everyone has ideas, but it’s much less known how to actually put that thing on paper ... it’s basically the same thing as having a hot take on your favorite team. It’s like, ‘This is what I think we should do.’”
Locke said he likes the Jazz’s current branding but feels the NBA Finals-era teams with the purple mountain jerseys should be more at the core of the team’s identity (he was elated when the team started wearing the throwbacks this season).
“The whole point of this thing is the Jazz really do belong to Utah,” he said of his concepts. “They’ve done so much more here than they ever did in New Orleans. The brand should be a Utah brand and not a Mardi Gras thing.”
While Locke just recently put his first idea out for the world to see, Brendon Nguyen, of Draper, has been coming up with jersey concepts for a few years now and sharing them on social media. Some of his concepts are merely combining different elements of current or past jersey designs, while his most recent one — a black and white Jazz jersey — gives more of a nod to jazz music with details such as lines that represent a staff.
“Utah jazz Alt concept ‘blues’ because none of our jerseys really represent ‘jazz’ well lol,” he captioned an image of the design.
“Ideas are endless,” he said. “I feel like there’s a lot of things you can do with a lot of different concepts that the Jazz already have. People love seeing new stuff.”
One of Nguyen’s ideas nearly three years ago was even brought to the attention of then-Jazz team president Steve Starks, who wrote on Twitter, “Well done and very sharp. Not part of our short-term future but its (sic) awesome to have Jazz fans crowdsource creative concepts.”
Riley Gisseman, who was among the first Jazz fans to start making jersey designs as a hobby if not the very first, said he began doing it when he was in high school to feel a greater connection to the team.
“It was about the Jazz,” he said. “It wasn’t necessarily about the art.”
As he would share his concepts on social media, he got feedback from followers, which has helped him become a rather well-known figure in the online Jazz fan community.
“I feel like in design, that’s an easy way to kind of get involved in the Jazz community, especially when you’re younger,” he said.
For Locke, there’s a wish — however small the chances might be — that someone who really can heavily influence what the Jazz’s threads look like in the future might take note of what he and others in this community are doing.
“The thing about ideas is that they don’t start doing anything until you can touch them,” he said. “If you put it on paper, it’s like ... maybe my stuff will inform whoever it is at the organization that does the jerseys. There’s this part of influencing the conversation from outside. There’s a little bit of hope there.”