The 2019–20 threads return.
If you’ve been following this team for more than five years, you likely remember the Bucks’ cream-colored City Edition jerseys. The first iteration was from 2017–18, which was the inaugural year of the NBA’s City-branding program and Nike’s initial year as the league’s jersey supplier. Those were a bit non-traditional without any text, but set a pattern which would be duplicated on the Bucks’ next black Statement Edition (aka third) jerseys, ones they wore in Game 6 of the 2021 NBA Finals:
Photo by Gary Dineen/NBAE via Getty Images
I liked these a lot. While we didn’t really know it at the time, that set was only around for one season, as the Bucks went to the Robert Indiana MECCA court-inspired designs the year after. But in 2019–20, the cream base returned with a much more traditional look, including a script “Cream City” that echoed Milwaukee Tools’ branding (I liked these a lot too):
Photo by Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images
That would be the last of the cream we’d see… until today. The Bucks are bringing back this very jersey for 2025–26 as their City Edition, after five seasons in which four of their City Edition threads had a blue base. Per the team, the jersey is unchanged from its previous version five years ago. I believe that the only other team to reuse a City Edition jersey was Utah; they kept their prior year’s design in each season from 2017–20, and again from 2020–22.
Why the long layoff? Well, you might recall seeing some glitching during Bucks games played in the NBA’s Covid-induced bubble in late summer 2020. As relayed by chief marketing officer Dustin Godsey to the great Paul Lukas of UniWatch, the cream coloration interfered with the new digital ads the league was projecting on courts for viewers:
Up until that point, there had been no issues. So we wore the “Cream City” uniform for a game in the bubble—I think it was August 2, 2020. Because of the unique situation there, with every game being played on a neutral site, teams were able to digitally put their arena naming rights onto the court during their local TV broadcasts. And because of that, in that first game of wearing cream down in the bubble, we started to realize it was kind of like the meteorologist wearing a green shirt while standing in front of the green screen—a pixelation effect.
Here’s how it looked at times:
So Milwaukee (and other teams) couldn’t wear off-white or cream jerseys as long as the ads were around, because obviously, the ads couldn’t be the things subtracted from this dilemma. Fans began to tire of the blue after the third or fourth time the Bucks used it, and I imagine merch sales of blue apparel were dropping too. There were one or two designs I really liked in blue, but I’m not sad to see it be relegated to a supporting role for at least another year. Cream is one of the Bucks’ two primary colors—they’re unique among NBA franchises (and sports franchises in general) in that regard—and it makes sense to highlight it.
Therefore, it’s good news for many that during this past regular season, our friend Justin Garcia from WTMJ and Locked On Bucks reported that the glitch had been fixed. Naturally, that prompted speculation on the Bucks returning to cream, and today we got our confirmation. Just not a new design, but a very well-done previous one reintroduced.
That’s not all, though. In conjunction with the cream set, the Bucks will pair it with an alternate court design:
If I’m not mistaken, Milwaukee was the first team to introduce a secondary floor just after their 2015 rebrand, with the black court that paired with their jersey set of the same color. Since then, they’ve gone through a few primary and secondary floors, including a blue one that replaced the damaged primary floor for much of the season a couple years ago, until a new primary was built.
While I think having the geographic coordinates of Fiserv so prominent is a bit cheesy (I’m just not a fan of using coordinates in branding) or “City Edition” under the rim, the rest is outstanding. The court is patterned with bricks: a nice touch that puts their own spin on classic parquet floors. Closer inspection reveals that the city’s street grid is overlaid onto the midrange between the three-point arc and key. I know the Bucks aren’t the first team to do this, but as a fan of maps, I liked it everywhere.
How do you feel about this return to an old jersey and the new floor? Or the use of “cream city” in general? I personally think it’s cool and I enjoy the historic nature of it (derived from the cream-colored clay brick that many pre-20th-century Milwaukee buildings are constructed from). However, it was not popular until more recently, and many Milwaukeeans still don’t even use the term. My mother is a Milwaukee native and never knew of it until the last ten years. Like her, some wrongly assume it deals with Wisconsin’s dairy industry, an understandable mistake. So I get the resistance to it, but as a nickname, it is not new, and nearly as old as the city itself.