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Last Friday, the Milwaukee Bucks unveiled their new City uniform for this season. The uniform is blue, which led some fans on social media to ask when the Bucks would be going back to a cream-colored City design, like the ones the team wore in 2017-18 and 2019-20.

Dustin Godsey, the Bucks’ chief marketing officer, saw those fans’ questions, so he responded to them with a cryptic tweet:

Hmmmm, that was intriguing. Why would the cream uniforms suddenly be off the table?

I have a good relationship with Godsey (he helped me out on a few ESPN stories back when the Bucks unveiled their current uniform set in 2015), so I emailed him and asked if he could tell me the backstory, even if only off the record, just to satisfy my own curiosity.

“I’m not sure I want to deal with the can of worms it will open, so I’ll tell you privately,” he wrote back. “But you, in particular, are going to hate it: Teams can’t wear cream anymore because it interferes with the digital ads that are placed on the court in broadcast due to the uniforms being so close to the color of the wood that is keyed out in the process.”

Whoa — I hadn’t seen that one coming! I had imagined a lot of possible explanations, most of which had to do with Nike dye lots and things like that, but I definitely hadn’t thought of anything like a digital ad.

Godsey was right, of course — I do hate that digital ads have essentially banished an entire color from the court. It’s the latest depressing case of the advertising tail wagging the uni dog. But as I explained to him, I also think it’s a fascinating example of the law of unintended consequences — and a story that fans would love to learn about.

After thinking about it for a bit, Godsey agreed to let me tell that story. Here’s a transcript of a Zoom conversation I had with him a few days ago, edited for length and clarity.

Uni Watch: Let’s start by talking about the Bucks’ use of cream. You guys started using it as an accent color in 2015. It’s an unusual color for a basketball uniform, so what was the thinking behind using that color?

Dustin Godsey: As we were going through the rebrand process, we were looking for that accent color that would help us sort of establish the brand and make sense within what we’re trying to do. We’ve got the Brewers here, so the idea of us trying to do anything with “Brew City” didn’t feel right for us.  But Milwaukee is also known locally as the Cream City, because of that Cream City brick. So for us to be able to take a moniker of the city and really be able to own that through the color scheme was important to us.

Uni Watch: Was it received well by the fan base?

Godsey: It was incredibly well received. Right from the beginning, when we initially launched it — we were still in the Adidas days at that point — people were already asking,  “What about cream uniforms? When is cream gonna be in there?” And at the time, we were required to have a white home uniform. The Lakers were the only team that was grandfathered into having a home uniform that wasn’t white. Even during the rebrand planning, we had talked about having a cream home uniform at that point, instead of white, but it wasn’t allowed. Otherwise we would have done it.

Uni Watch: But you did eventually have two cream alternate uniforms. The first one had the deer’s head logo on the front, which was your City uniform for 2017-18. And then you had the “Cream City” script uniform, which was your City design for 2019-20. How were those two designs received by the fan base, and also by the players?

Godsey: Again, they were very well received. I think it established what we wanted, which was to have ownership of the cream color and uniform. So it helped us kind of build that Cream City brand, which is what we were hoping for it to accomplish.

Uni Watch: So it sounds like everything about this color was a big win for the Bucks. When did it become a problem?

Godsey: Interestingly, it happened in the bubble [where the league finished the 2019-20 season after the start of the pandemic]. 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 Aug. 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.

Uni W