The WNBA announced its full slate of uniforms for the upcoming year, which will be its 25th. Each of the league’s 12 teams will receive a trio of kits through Nike: the WNBA Nike Heroine Edition (home), the WNBA Nike Explorer Edition (away), and the WNBA Nike Rebel Edition (third).
There are a few fun twists that all of these will include, like all of them being numbered 1/144 to celebrate the 144 players who make up WNBA rosters. But at the end of the day, the important things with unis is that they look cool and tell a story, and fortunately for the players who will wear them on a nightly basis, that absolutely happened, as some of these threads are among the best sports uniforms that have been released.
“The basketball uniform is an important representation of the brand of WNBA players and teams, and a point of pride for fans,” WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert said in a statement. “In partnership with Nike, unveiling new and exciting adaptations of the WNBA uniforms is a dynamic way to build on the foundation of the league’s first 25 years.”
The Explorer edition threads feature some gems — I’m partial to the Chicago Sky’s pinstripe-inspired look and the palm tree on display on the Los Angeles Sparks’ unis. Don’t sleep on the Phoenix Mercury’s kits, either, as a good gradient should never go unrecognized.
The Rebel editions include some of the real showstoppers. For my money, the best of the bunch is the Indiana Fever’s jerseys that pay tribute to Stranger Things, and go down as one of the best individual uniforms in sports right now. The Sky’s are once again quite good, as are the ones for the Minnesota Lynx, which celebrate the First Avenue concert venue in Minneapolis, as are the Washington Mystics’ 19th Amendment-inspired jerseys.
Usually these kinds of widespread uniform releases feature a few major misses, but Nike and the WNBA went 24-for-24 here. The Rebel edition threads dropped on April 8, while the Explorer editions come out April 14.