Detroit PistonsCopied

The Pistons' red, white and blue ball defined the Bad Boys teams of the late 1980s. In 1996 the club dumped it for a flaming stallion with a fiery exhaust under the name, chasing the flashier NBA of the Jordan era. After lean playoff years and fan pressure it retreated in 2005 to a ball with the name arched in a blue ring, which Metro Times dismissed as a word-art monstrosity.

With the team moving downtown to Little Caesars Arena, the Pistons spent six months redesigning the primary logo in-house with Nike and the NBA. Charlie Metzger, executive vice-president and chief marketing and communications officer, called it a new chapter and said the mark celebrated the club's long history in Detroit sport while giving it a modern design for the future.

The result, unveiled on 16 May 2017, is essentially the 1979-96 logo again. Transform described the current wordmark's typeface set on the traditional backdrop of the old identity. The club's release listed the changes: sleek, accurate groove lines, a bold team uniform font and a chrome outline. It rolled out across kits, the arena and merchandise for the 2017-18 season.

Metro Times could barely spot the difference and called the release a fancy way to dress up a chrome rim and a new font, while conceding it beat what came before.

Detroit's Metro Times was unimpressed: after a six month collaboration with the league and its uniform partner, the team released a logo it could barely distinguish from the one worn in the Bad Boys era of the 1980s and 1990s. The release insisted it was a modern version, with sleeker groove lines, a bold team font and a chrome outline, and the chief marketing officer said it honoured the club's history while reflecting its future. Nostalgia is a legitimate strategy for a team moving downtown to a new arena; it just makes the six months hard to see.

That is the fair verdict. Six months for a near-identical logo sounds absurd, but the job was really to admit a mistake and return to the mark fans never stopped buying. The chrome outline is the one unforced error: a 2017 gloss detail on a logo whose strength is its plain 1980s confidence.