Media Day is less than a week away for the Celtics, but the story that’s currently taking hold of the Boston community is less about how they’ll perform in their title defense, and more around what alternate jerseys they’ll be wearing when they do tip-off the season.
Leaked images of Nike’s newest iteration of their City Edition alternates are starting to pour out league-wide, and Celtics fans are less than happy with the rumored results.
Every season, fans across each of the NBA’s 30 teams share their less-than-enthused opinions about Nike’s City Editions. In the case of the most recent Celtics alternates, fans have shouted from the hilltops of their desire to see the designs of Pete Rogers and the Banner18 brand brought into the mainstream.
Just hours before the leaks of their latest City Editions, I sat down with Pete to discuss the state of the City Edition jersey, how he would approach the model, and what fans can expect in his third year of designing jerseys after every Celtics win.
64 wins, 64 jerseys
Since the 2022-23 season, Pete Rogers has taken on the challenge of creating Celtics jerseys after every single win. In that time, the Celtics have won 121 regular season games.
It’s become a staple of the online Celtics community, with many of those designs bleeding out into the stands of TD Garden. If you’re at a game, chances are you’ve seen one of his creations.
As someone who grew up just outside Boston, Pete’s understanding of the city’s culture and history beyond the game of basketball has made him a local celebrity, even with his family currently residing in Minneapolis.
From jerseys referencing the Boston MBTA and the Rainbow Swash down to Robert McCloskey’s children’s book Make Way for Ducklings, Pete has found a way to tap into the city’s culture through a basketball jersey.
“Yes, it has nothing to do with the Celtics, and yes, maybe it doesn’t have broad mass appeal, but it’s going to hit home with a certain group of people, and I feel like that’s the purpose of what you would call a city jersey,” Rogers said.
So, it comes as no surprise that Pete’s jerseys speak to life in Boston as much as life as a Celtics fan. And, like the rest of the Celtics community, he feels Nike is missing serious opportunities with their City Edition jerseys.
“I think that the moniker of a city jersey, Nike has lost what initially I feel like that premise was, and I think that’s kind of a bummer because through my own Celtics challenges of doing a bunch of Celtics jerseys each year, there’s so much that cities have to offer in terms of inspiration and sometimes you never know what’s just going to resonate with people, and I think that’s such a cool way to design jerseys with that,” he said.
Not to say that he thinks all City Editions are bad. In fact, he’s one of many that found the last two Celtics City Editions to be strong designs, but there appears to be a stagnation within many of the more popular designs, like the two most recent leaks of the Golden State Warriors and Philadelphia 76ers, both of which are white iterations of last year’s jersey.
“It feels to me that Nike will occasionally hit on a jersey that is beloved, and then they will run that into the ground over the next three to four seasons to the point where people are like, ‘okay, give me something new’ and they won’t have anything new, and so they just kind of then think of something else to do and then retread that for a while,” he said.
A fresh approach
So, what does a fresh approach look like to Pete?
Even at the expense of mass appeal, the goal of the City Edition for him is to tap into something specifically tailored to the fan residing within that team’s city.
If he were in charge, he’d focus on the three primary jerseys that are constantly rotated game-to-game (Association, Icon, Statement), a throwback jersey, a reintroduction to the Earned Editions that were granted to playoff teams, and a City Edition that’s tied to the local fan’s experience, with more of a collector’s item appeal.
The concept used by the Brooklyn Nets in past seasons of a local artist-designed jersey is also something he found generated similar sentiments.
“I think that’s a great way to do it where it’s connecting to the people of the city in a way that they’re being designed by local artists, and those local artists have a perspective of the city.”
For a jersey aimed at honoring the team’s most recent championship, the ideas have been flowing for Pete. He’s a big fan of further references to the parquet floor, like on last year’s City Edition, as well as the popular design choice of the Larry O’Brien replacing the “i” in Celtics.
An idea he’s had locked away for a while also involves including Red Auerbach’s cigar, a choice that would surely be met with appraisal.
Photo by Dick Raphael/NBAE via Getty Images
Looking ahead to the new season
The offseason generally acts as a sort of mental break for Pete, but once City Edition designs begin to drop and the season’s gearing up for live action, the designing process begins to set in motion.
All it takes is a small piece to the puzzle for inspiration to strike: an interesting font here, a well-utilized logo there. Once that first piece is set, everything seems to fall into place.
Inspiration can often hit at the most inopportune times during the season, like a late night lying in bed that’s prematurely cut off as the light bulb flickers on, and he rushes to design the jersey seared into his brain.
Pete is, admittedly, a little nervous about another season chartering past 60 wins. When he started this jersey challenge, there was never a true endpoint in mind, but the challenge grows more difficult with each passing season, which means more outside-the-box thinking.
“If they do 70+ wins, I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said, laughing. “I’m going to have to start just designing jerseys after a week of winning as opposed to every game because that one might break me.
“But ultimately, I am very excited again to try it out again this year and see what I can ultimately come up with because it’s been a ton of fun and it’s been absolutely amazing for it to garner the recognition and attention that it has. And I’m super excited to keep it going and see how many years I can get under my belt before I ultimately am just like, this is untenable.”
The same goes for his playoff tradition of building a Celtics jersey around the designs of historic uniforms of their opponents, a process that he says does a lot of the work for him in terms of design.
“I really like it because it allows me to dive deep into a team’s jersey history, and you sometimes see jerseys that you’re like, ‘oh, I haven’t really seen that jersey before.’ Or you’re like, ‘I don’t really know if I like that jersey,’ but then you put it in Celtics coloration or Celtics word marks and whatnot, and you’re like, ‘oh, that actually works much better with the Celtics.’”
The season is fast approaching, which means Pete is already previewing new designs that may help fans get over the anger of the City Edition leak. The most recent reveal is inspired by a Jordan Tatum 3 design entitled “Welcome to the Garden.”
You can find Pete Rogers on X @petemrogers, and his jersey drops at shopbanner18.com.
