- Jun 3, 2012
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I think the authentics are pretty well made personally. Haven’t seen the Lakers city version, but I’m looking at the gold authentic Kobe jersey right now and have no complaints. I think as a jersey collector, my expectations had to change for authentics, being accustomed to the lighter replica and expecting a heavy duty authentic with triple layer names and numbers, etc but sometimes it’s easy to forget all of the innovation they made for performance and that these are as close to what they wear on field/court, and obviously lighter has the advantage.
For me personally, I disagree. If Nike wanted to truly go as light as possible they would just use the same screen printing they use on swingman jerseys for all numbers, names and wordmarks/logos. For the most part they have with the NBA logo and swoosh, but everything else is just a flimsy piece of twill. Adidas did it best IMO, very light material, but in comparison to Nike the Rev30's used different variations for team wordmarks, some were single layer twill stitched on, some were thicker pieces of twill heat-applied together then heat-spplied onto the jersey, some were heat-applied twill with mesh material etc. Then the numbers were almost always twill outlines (referred to as the base layer to actually stitch the number to the jersey) with mesh making the rest of the number.
That all said to say that Adidas did what I thought was the best combination of that thicker richer feeling materials but implemented in a way that made them comfortable and still offering "performance". And most importantly, you knew without a doubt the difference between a swingman and an authentic.