Today in the Ticker: The Lakers retire George Mikan’s number, still-active original NWSL players get jackets, and more.
Uni Watch News Ticker for Oct. 31, 2022
Posted in:
Baseball
MLB
- Astros P Framber Veldez apparently changed gloves and cleats partway through World Series Game 2. (From Trevor Williams)
- Here’s a story on a young cleat designer for players in MLB and some other leagues. His clients include players on both teams in the World Series. (From Michael Rich)
Football
College
- Left over from Saturday: A Division III game between Hampden-Sydney and Guilford saw both teams playing toward the same end zone because the grounds crew backed into one of their goalposts with a piece of equipment, destroying it.
Hockey
NHL
- The Red Wings’ locker room has a locker that “belongs” to former goalie Terry Sawchuk. Based on the video that screenshot comes from, with goalies Ville Husso and Alex Nedeljkovic’s lockers visible next to it, as well as its generic-looking helmet and pads, I’d guess that locker might be used for an emergency backup goalie. (From Scott Stubberfield)
- Former NHL center Jeremy Roenick scored his first league goal with Chicago in 1989 wearing an NNOB jersey because he was a late call-up to the game in question. He says he’s the only player to ever do that, but obviously he means he’s the only one since the NHL added NOBs. (From Brandon Weir)
Basketball
NBA
- The Lakers retired No. 99 for George Mikan last night and also took the occasion to update the rest of their retired number banners. (From multiple readers)
- The NOBs on the Pistons’ throwbacks are arched when the originals weren’t. (From Samuel Lam)
- The Mavericks still have the NBA 75th-anniversary logo on their backboards. (From Tod Meisner)
Soccer
USA
- Here’s the commemorative printing on the uniforms for the NWSL championship, which included the game’s logo down by the hip on the opposite side of the 10th-anniversary logo.
- There are 21 players who have played in every NWSL season. The league gave them jackets this weekend and several of the players were at the championship game — at least two were playing in it. (Also from @JayChucksFrank)
- Since the Thorns won, they’ve already added a third star to their crest.
- The Athletic has a new piece on MLS’s upcoming broadcast deal with Apple TV with some uni-adjacent tidbits, including that teams are to wear one of several Apple-related sleeve ads and may be restricted in what ads they can show on adboards. (From Michael Rich)
International
- England: Manchester United women’s manager Marc Skinner said his team is looking into wearing black shorts at home, which would make them the latest of several women’s teams in the UK to ditch white shorts. They also wore black shorts for an away game yesterday.
- England: It’s the second week of Rainbow Laces in England, so Brighton and Hove Albion’s women’s team wore rainbow numbers and NOBs. They also wore black armbands in memory of the victims of the Seoul crowd crush on Saturday.
- Scotland: Teams in the men’s and women’s top four tiers took part in the annual campaign for the charity Show Racism the Red Card, primarily with decals attached to their shirts and training/warm-up shirts.
Auto Racing
- Formula One driver Max Verstappen, who has already won this season’s drivers’ championship, had a new gold helmet for yesterday’s Mexico City Grand Prix that featured actual gold leaf. (From James Gilbert)
- Aston Martin F1 driver Sebastian Vettel also wore a helmet design based on his time at Red Bull in memory of Red Bull co-founder Dietrich Mateschitz, who passed away last week.
Rugby
- Yesterday we had a Ticker item about England and Scotland’s men’s rugby union teams adding NOBs for some games this fall. The first of those games was Scotland/Australia on Saturday. The slight problem is that Scotland already has an ad where the NOB would go, so the NOBs were smaller than you might expect.
Grab Bag
- Netball Australia, recently mired in controversy about one of its senior national team’s uniform ads, has quickly found a replacement.
- Movie details: Reader L.J. Sparvero tells us that in a book on the making of the movie Mad Max: Fury Road, the movie’s production designer says he used a Brannock device, or as he puts it, “an old shoe-size measurer that you used to see in the shoe stores in the old days,” for an accelerator in a car. It did actually make it into the movie briefly.
Comments (6)
I wonder if the fact that the Browns wear brown and orange and the Bengals wear black and orange had any bearing on the NFL scheduling them for the Halloween game.
It would make sense. When they were putting together the schedule, this looked like a very attractive game that would almost certainly determine the top of the AFC North standings.
Unfortunately, the Browns have a moron of a coach who has two all-pro running backs and has absolutely no clue what to do with them. That’s because he’s not a football coach, he’s a system zombie. A football coach bases his game plans on the strengths and weaknesses of the players he has. Stefanski tries to cram players into his beloved system, which he is convinced is the best system in the history of football, and he will not deviate from it no matter what. End of tangential rant.
I am literally stunned that Mikan’s jersey had not been retired until last night.
Chick Hearn wore a jersey? :-P
I, too, am stunned that Mikan’s 99 had not been retired previously. However, I haven’t paid close attention to basketball for about 20 years.
I’m more surprised that the T-Wolves didn’t retire Mikan’s number, considering he played his entire career in the same city as them. It’s always odd to me to see numbers retired for players that have no direct connection to the city other than the fact that some owner took a team from somewhere else and planted it there.
I would argue that the number belongs to the franchise, not the city/metro area. That said, I don’t think it is inappropriate for the Wolves to retire Mikan’s number under these circumstances, especially with it being a less popular basketball number.
You can argue what you’d like, it still seems odd to me to have a jersey hanging somewhere that someone never played. He played in Minneapolis, so it’s odd to have his number retired by the Los Angeles Lakers- a team he never played for even though the ‘franchise’ kept the name Lakers upon uprooting the team. To do it so long after he played and after the team moved makes it even more bizarre, but in almost all cases, it just doesn’t seem right.