Which Major Sports Teams Are Most In Need of a Revamp?

Welcome to the weekend. As you may know, before I started writing for this site*, I worked at a grocery store to pay the bills while I was in college. Often, I would work a closing shift (at this particular store, 3 PM to 11 PM) with a handful of other people roughly my age. The place would be dead after 8:30 or 9, especially on a weeknight. This gave us lots of free time to discuss many, many things. I do remember one conversation I had with some of my coworkers on one of those nights, about what our least favorite sports uniforms were.

This was in 2015 or 2016. Three of the teams we talked about still haven’t changed.

Leaving aside their identity crisis in the mid-2000s (they are, officially, the Los Angeles Angels — no more “of Anaheim” suffix), the Angels have been pretty much unchanged since dropping their Disney uniforms ahead of the 2002 season. And while they instantly won their first World Series in the new threads (and were pretty competitive for the remainder of the 2000s), it is now more than time for the Angels to ditch the red. It has never made sense to me that a team called “the Angels” wore red, a color traditionally associated with the devil and demons. Let’s get some golds and blues up in here, some really heavenly shit.

I’ve never liked the wordmark — it’s always felt off-center and unbalanced to me. I’ve also never liked their sleeve patch. It’s just their cap logo, on the sleeve. It was extremely annoying when the Angels had both the roundel-A and cap logo sleeve patch, but then they kept the worse one when they added the ad patch!

Also: put the location name on the road jersey. I don’t care whether it’s Anaheim or Los Angeles or even California. Just please put it on the road jersey. Few things annoy me more in baseball, especially when the Angels’ wordmark is as weak as it is.

I’ve made no secret my disdain for the Mavericks’ unis (see this piece from after the NBA trade deadline), but it is kind of mindblowing to me that the team has been virtually unchanged since 2001, Mark Cuban’s first full season owning the team. Think about how long ago 2001 actually was. Everyone had a 70-pound CRT TV. AIM was the height of social media. Cell phones looked like this. Bill Clinton was still president for the first three weeks of that year!

It makes sense that Cuban, who became one of the very first tech billionaires, pivoted the Mavericks away from their previous identity towards the Y2K aesthetic, which was omnipresent at the time. What doesn’t make sense is that it’s stuck around for a quarter-century, long after the aesthetic faded into obscurity.

The fact that the Mavs have retained these for so long astounds me. They weren’t particularly good in 2001, and they’re extremely dated now. I would love to see the Mavs reorient their identity around this year’s City Editions, which have a more Dallas-y feel, in addition to being unlike any other primary look in the NBA.

Perhaps my most controversial pick for this piece. The Bruins first adopted this look back in 2007 (time flies) after a decade wearing what fans now call the Joe Thornton-era unis.

The adoption of this set marked a turning point in Bruins history. The offseason before, the Bruins used their vacant cap space from the Thornton trade to add towering defenseman Zdeno Chara and forward Marc Savard. With the emergence of youngsters Patrice Bergeron, Brad Marchand, and David Krejci, the Bruins became one of the best teams in the NHL in the 2010s.

But now it’s 2025. Chara, Krejci, and Bergeron are retired. Savard’s been retired for over a decade following concussion issues. Marchand has been traded for one last Cup run. The Bruins are on a ten-game losing streak at the time of writing.

Like the team, the unis are starting to creak. The logo, which at the time seemed fresh and clean, now feels a bit busy. The shoulder yokes, which once felt retro, now just feel dated. The Bruins also dropped yellow socks for black in 2017, which downgraded the look of the home uni. When the team adopted their centennial season unis in 2023, it really brought to light just how much better the Bruins could look.

Now, the B’s are all but confirmed to be dropping these unis at the end of the season, and (if the leak is to be believed) will be addressing basically all of my concerns. Like in 2007, it seems to be the perfect time to say goodbye and usher in a new era of Bruins hockey with a new uniform. Let’s just hope they have yellow socks.

Moving from a team whose current look was adopted in 2007 to a team whose current look was adopted in 2008, the Tampa Bay baseball team has now spent nearly twice as long as the “Rays” than they ever did as the “Devil Rays.” One of the first critiques I ever remember hearing about the Rays’ look was that they went from looking like a professional baseball team to looking like a Florida retirement home’s baseball team, and that still feels right today.

There’s widespread nostalgia for the (Devil) Rays’ original, 90s-tastic look, but I was always partial to their second look, which they started wearing after only three seasons with their first identity. I feel like they could go back to this with minimal changes and instantly be one of the better-looking teams in MLB, instead of one of the most forgettable.

Also: neither MLB team I’ve chosen for this list has their location on their road jersey. I wasn’t thinking about that when I chose them (both the Angels and Rays were chosen because their looks are boring and forgettable and were adopted when I was a kid, and now I’m 30), but now I feel like I have to point it out.

The Thunder’s identity has always felt like a placeholder that everyone kind of forgot was a placeholder. There is nothing about the Thunder’s colorway, fonts, or logos that actually evokes “Thunder.” Where are the menacing deep greys and purples, like the sky during a thunderstorm? Where are the lightning bolts?

Don’t even get me started on this logo. It looks like clip art, and could be used for a basketball team called literally anything as long as they called Oklahoma City home. Back in 2015, the incomparable Zach Lowe ranked all 30 NBA team logos for Grantland. The Thunder were last. He spoke with designer Dick Sakahara, who worked with the Thunder on their identity, who told him that he had “a lot of bison [designs] that never got to be.” How cool would a bison logo be for Oklahoma’s only pro sports team? Lowe also spoke with Brian Byrnes, then the Thunder’s senior vice president for marketing and sales, who told Lowe “We didn’t feel like having professional players represented by [an] animal was where we wanted to be.” Someone should remind Byrnes of the Lions, Tigers, Eagles, Bulls, Cubs, Grizzlies, Cardinals, Bears…you get the idea.

The Thunder could be really cool. Instead, they’re really not.

_{*I also worked at a grocery store for many years while still writing for this site, but that’s neither here nor there.}