T-Shirt Collection: Atlantic Division

I have a weakness for NBA t-shirts, especially those with logos from the 1980's or earlier.  My wife gets on my case for having too many shirts, and quite frankly, she's right.  But I'm pretty sure that it's the only situation where my obsessive-compulsive tendencies come out.  There are a lot of them, and to keep my obsession's status fixed as 'out-of-sight/out-of-mind', I made space in two dresser drawers for them.  Why does this matter?  Well, it impacts my organizational scheme.  Since I have enough room for four piles of shirts, and since the NBA of my youth had four divisions, my system is to use a separate pile for each division.  Here's most of my pile for the Atlantic Division, with an oddball or two thrown in.

The Sixers, Warriors, and Jazz all made tremendously positive uniform changes before the 2010-11 season, each abandoning newer styles in favor of themes from their classics jerseys of 20+ years earlier.  Philadelphia made changes to bring back the red-and-blue '76' shown on these shirts.  Win.

I'm also a sucker for shirts from relocated/defunct teams, so this Syracuse Nationals shirt was a must-have item. Their title in 1955 is one of the three for the Nationals/Sixers franchise, which relocated to Philly in 1963.

One of my preferences for choosing shirts is to pick those which have a championship date on the front, if possible.  (Guess I'll be waiting a while on that Cavs shirt.)  So while my feelings for the Knicks are rather ambivalent (too much media adoration for a team of mediocrity), this shirt works okay.  (More 'blah', and way too many parenthetical notes for such a small paragraph.)

This one has been brutalized from overuse.  It's baggy and comfortable and it makes a good pickup ball shirt. Living in the DMV area, this logo often gets the attention of the locals.  In fact, the only two logos for the Wizards franchise that are worth wearing are the one shown here and the one with the gnome-like hands reaching for a basketball.  The current logo is an abomination. I have a theory that when they switch logos, they need to somehow incorporate the Opera Singer, which came about from their 1978 title run.

At some point, I need to add a shirt to this collection with the logo that looks like a highway sign for the Turnpike, but until then, this shirt will have to do.  It gets bonus points for 1) being from the ABA, 2) having Dr. J's name and number on the back, and 3) being the one Dr. J. wore when he had his best afro.

Growing up in southeast Massachusetts while obsessed with basketball virtually guaranteed that I would turn out a Celtics fan.  And I did -- starting around 1978 when Bird had been drafted but not yet delivered.  Here we have shirts for both the '76 and '81 title teams, plus one for the player who linked the teams (in a way), Dave Cowens.

As a era in basketball history, this five-year period is fascinating for the parallel changes in both the league and the Celtics.  As a league, the NBA incorporated four ABA teams (San Antonio, Indiana, Denver, and the New York Nets), but struggled immediately thereafter with issues of bad attendance, dwindling TV ratings (and the accompanying loss of TV exposure), and drugs.  The book What's Happenin'? is a valuable account of the Supersonics in their pre-title days during the 1976-77 season.  In addition to chronicling the team and foreshadowing the success that would come in the near future, the author also gives a first-person account of the dialogue in a hotel when he sat in a room with some Sonics players and smoked pot while getting high watching NBA games (with the TV sound turned off and appropriate music used in its place).  Trying to picture that scene occurring in 2011 will contort your brain on itself like a Klein bottle. 

The Celtics ups and downs mirrored the league.  In between those two title teams, they were a catastrophe, including consecutive seasons where they bottomed out with 32 and 29 wins, hitting the last spot of their division with the latter.  No other team in NBA history won a title, suffered through a 100% changeover of the roster, only to win another title within 5 years.  John Powers diary of the the Celtics in 1977-78, The Short Season, details the suffering of Cowens during those hard times (unbelievably, he lead the team in points, rebounds, assists, blocks and steals in the same season), while also giving insight into Red Auerbach's behind-the-scenes maneuvering.  Red won nine titles as coach, but his stint as GM during this period may be more impressive.  The roster turnover alone (described well in Powers' book) is amazing, but to put the embryo of a championship team in place while enduring disfunctional ownership is absolutely jaw-dropping.

The 1976 Championship tee is made by Junk Food; their soft, thin shirts are better than anyone else's.

Bonus:  When the Miami Heat came into the league in 1988, they were originally placed into the Midwest Division for a season.  The next season, they moved to a more geographically appropriate spot, the Atlantic Division, where they remained until the NBA realigned into six divisions in 2004.  The Miami Floridians were in the ABA, but since the Heat wore their throwbacks a while back, it seems like they should be placed in the spot where the Heat were located for their majority of their existence.  The logo for the Floridians is perfectly apropos; there is no finer color scheme to represent South Beach than black, pink, and orange.  Add to that a Jerry West-style logo (which predates the NBA's version by a year) and you can clearly see why they needed to replace this logo, which looks like Ray Charles trying not to fall down while dribbling a basketball.