NBA Team Colors

The NBA doesn't publish a single master palette. Each of the 30 franchises specifies its own colors in a reproduction and usage guideline sheet, so the codes on third-party sites go stale whenever a team rebrands.

Utah is the recent example. The Jazz dropped yellow for 2025-26 and moved to Mountain Purple, Midnight Black and Sky Blue (Utah Jazz, 2024).

What those sheets contain is a primary color, a secondary and a few accents, each specified in HEX, RGB and Pantone values. The colors end up on uniforms, logos, courts and merchandise. Designers and printers match them in ink, developers in code.

What Colors Does Each NBA Team Use?

Palettes run from two to five colors per team, with one primary color up front and a secondary behind it.

Blue and black show up most, with red close behind. Brooklyn's strict black and white and Milwaukee's cream have no match anywhere else in the league.

The tables below follow the league's own layout, Eastern teams first and then Western, each conference split into three divisions of five. Palettes are current as of November 2026.

Plenty of older color lists still show Volt Green for Atlanta and navy, green and yellow for Utah, and both are out of date. The Hawks retired Volt Green in July 2020 (Sports Illustrated, 2020). The Jazz followed with Mountain Purple, Midnight Black and Sky Blue for 2025-26 (KSL Sports, 2025).

Eastern Conference Teams

Atlantic Division

Central Division

Southeast Division

Western Conference Teams

Northwest Division

Pacific Division

Southwest Division

Color Codes for Every NBA Team (HEX, RGB and Pantone)

HEX codes cover screens and Pantone references cover print and fabric, so each team's primary color gets both in the tables below, along with an RGB triplet and the HEX of the secondary color.

HEX is the six-character code for web and app work, like #552583 for Lakers purple. The same purple written as red, green and blue values from 0 to 255 comes out as 85, 37, 131, which is the RGB version. Pantone is the odd one out. It's a numbered PMS reference that printers and embroiderers use to match printed and stitched colors.

The RGB values here were converted from the HEX codes instead of copied. Copied triplets don't always agree with their own HEX, but converting each HEX code to RGB gives the same answer every time.

The Pantone entries are the closest matches the reference sources list. Printers proof against a physical swatch anyway, so the Pantone number works best as a starting point.

CMYK isn't in the tables. It shifts with the press and the ink profile, so one set of numbers only holds for one setup. Team Color Codes lists the Trail Blazers' red #E03A3E as CMYK (0, 91, 76, 6), and a different profile returns different numbers.

These values come from third-party color references (Design Your Way, 2026; Team Color Codes), not from a league style guide. Several franchises have rebranded since 2020, so re-check a code before any print order.

Eastern Conference Color Codes

Atlantic Division

Central Division

Southeast Division

Western Conference Color Codes

Northwest Division

Utah's Mountain Purple has no published Pantone value. The Jazz value above is approximate and sampled from current artwork, per Design Your Way's 2026 Utah Jazz colors guide.

Pacific Division

Southwest Division

Which Colors Do NBA Teams Use Most?

Black and blue (navy included) lead the league, red comes next, and silver and yellow trail those. Purple sits mid-table, and a few colors belong to just one team.

• Black shows up on 18 teams in Team Color Codes' published tally and on 19 in the palettes listed above.
• Blue and navy cover 17 teams in Team Color Codes' tally and 16 in the palettes above, since Cleveland dropped navy in 2022.
• Red lands on 12 teams in both counts.
• Purple has 4 teams in Team Color Codes' tally and 5 in the palettes above (Hornets, Jazz, Kings, Lakers, Suns).
• Cream, teal and brown each belong to a single team (Bucks, Hornets, Celtics).

The two tallies agree on red and disagree on the rest. Atlanta, Cleveland and Utah all changed palettes recently, which moves black, blue and purple by a team or so, and the published numbers lag behind the current league by about one team each.

Teams That Share an Exact Color Value

A few teams turn up with identical HEX values in the reference listings.

• The Bulls, Raptors and Rockets all list red as #CE1141.
• Pistons, Clippers and Hawks share red #C8102E.
• The Knicks and 76ers both use blue #006BB6.
• Hornets and Suns have purple #1D1160 in common.
• Timberwolves and Pelicans land on the same navy, #0C2340.

What separates them is the pairing. The Bulls, Blazers, Raptors and Rockets all lead with red and back it with black, so secondary and accent colors do the identifying.

A shade also reads differently depending on its company. Pistons red beside royal blue looks nothing like that same red beside black.

Colors Only One Team Uses

Brooklyn runs black and white and nothing else.

When the Nets unveiled the scheme on April 30, 2012, the team called itself the lone NBA club using only those two colors (Brooklyn Nets, 2012). Brooklyn's palette is still two colors today. I'd argue it's the cleanest identity in the league, mostly because there's nothing to get wrong.

Milwaukee's cream is the other clear case. The Bucks said in their 2015 identity release that they are the only NBA team featuring a cream hue (Sports Illustrated, 2015).

Charlotte holds the teal accent in a purple palette, and Team Color Codes lists brown for the Celtics alone.

Why Did Each NBA Team Choose Its Colors?

Plenty of franchises have no documented reason for their colors. The stories below cover the ones that do, and they tend to split between local symbolism and team history, with a couple coming down to one owner's call.

Colors Tied to a City or State

Milwaukee's palette is the clearest case. The Bucks announced it on April 13, 2015, and gave every color a local reason (Sports Illustrated, 2015).

Good Land Green has been the franchise's color since 1968 and ties back to Wisconsin's woods. Cream City Cream comes from Milwaukee's nickname and its cream-colored brick, and Great Lakes Blue refers to the lakes and rivers of the region.

That cream was a gutsy call, since no other team used it. Team Color Codes also links the Pacers, Knicks, Thunder and Pelicans palettes to state or city flags.

Colors Carried Over From an Earlier Team or Era

Atlanta has worn red since the franchise began in St. Louis. The 2015 Volt Green borrowed from their early 1970s teams (Atlanta Hawks, 2015), and the team retired it in July 2020 for Torch Red, Legacy Yellow and Infinity Black, which it called staples since arriving in Atlanta in 1968.

Utah's franchise arrived from New Orleans in 1979 in Mardi Gras purple, gold and green (KSL, 2022). Purple came back to the official palette with the Mountain Basketball identity announced in June 2024.

Colors Picked by an Owner

The Lakers moved into the Forum in 1967 and adopted purple and gold.

Owner Jack Kent Cooke brought the scheme in to give the team a regal look (Design Your Way, 2026). He liked the royal feel of purple but not the word, which is why the shade was officially called Forum blue into the early 1980s. The franchise has kept the colors for nearly six decades.

Brooklyn's black and white came from part-owner Jay-Z, who drew on the 1957 New York subway signage. NBA deputy commissioner Adam Silver said the league had been pushing teams toward traditional primary colors over black, but agreed the scheme suited the market (Associated Press, 2012).

How Have NBA Team Colors Changed Over Time?

A team can rebrand completely or go back to an older palette, and every year some alternate uniform gets recolored for a single season. The recolors are routine. Palette overhauls are the exception.

NBC's 2025-26 uniform tracker shows the ratio. It lists only a couple of full rebrands next to a long run of recolored or returning City Edition sets.

A rebrand resets the logo and wordmark along with the uniforms, though the palette may or may not move.

• On November 24, 2013, Charlotte's Bobcats announced purple and teal as primary colors for the return of the Hornets name in 2014-15, replacing orange and blue.
• Between August and December 2017, Nike took over as league uniform supplier and rolled out Association, Icon, Statement and City sets for every team.
• On June 2, 2022, Cleveland dropped navy and restored a metallic gold next to wine and black.
• On June 3, 2025, Orlando unveiled a new logo and uniforms but kept Magic blue, black and silver.

Charlotte's move came with numbers. The team's polling put support for the Hornets name at about 80 percent, with the purple-and-teal return running nearly as high (Sports Illustrated, 2013).

Orlando's change was slower. The Magic described a rebrand process of four years (WKMG, 2025), and the palette came through intact, with pinstripes and a star logo added.

All three leaned on the past. Charlotte restored colors introduced by designer Alexander Julian in 1988 (Sports Business Journal, 2014), and Cleveland went back to a gold dating to the early 1980s. Orlando did something similar with 1990s pinstripes.

Recolors are cheaper. Charlotte's 2025-26 City Edition reuses its 2021-22 set with purple lettering on a yellow base (NBC, 2025).

Every published code carries a date, so a code is only as current as the franchise's last rebrand.

How Do Icon, Association, Statement and City Editions Use NBA Team Colors?

Every team gets four core uniform editions, and the palette gets applied a bit differently in each. Association is the white base. Icon carries the team's main color. Statement adds contrast, while City is where local themes come in.

The league counted 123 different uniforms for the 2021-22 regular season, with every team issued the four core sets (ESPN, 2021). Classic and Earned sets sit on top of those.

Association and Icon Editions

Both arrived in August 2017 and replaced the old home and road labels (NBA.com, 2017). Association is the white set. Icon gets the team's signature color.

Cleveland's 2022 sets show the rule in practice, with a white Association jersey accented in wine and gold next to a wine Icon jersey with gold lettering (WKYC, 2022).

Statement Edition

Teams treat Statement as the high-contrast option, usually in black or a darker secondary color, and the league positioned it for big rivalry games (The Week, 2017).

Every Statement uniform carried the Jumpman logo starting in 2020-21 (Bleacher Report, 2020).

City Edition

Nike's pitch in 2017 was a new City Edition for all 30 teams every year (SGB, 2017). A few returning sets show how far the palette can bend.

• Minnesota brought back "Purple Rain," last worn in 2018-19, for 2025-26 (NBC, 2025), and it uses a color outside the team's blue and green core.
• Miami's "Miami Vice" set puts blue and pink lettering on black.
• Denver's "Rainbow Skyline" was last worn in 2019-20.

Classic and Earned Editions

Classic sets are throwbacks. Nike built them for eight teams in 2017-18, worn at each team's discretion (Nike, 2017, via FashionNetwork).

Earned was a perk for the 16 teams that reached the previous postseason, first issued in December 2018 as recolors of existing City and Statement designs (SportsLogos.Net, 2018).

The program skipped 2019-20 and returned for 2020-21 (NBA.com, 2021). Sources split on what came next. Uni Watch (2023) lists 2020-21 as the last season for Earned jerseys, while an NBC Sports Philadelphia roundup for 2022-23 still lists an Earned set for one team.

Treat the Earned Edition as dormant until the NBA announces a new set.

Choosing a Color Format: HEX, RGB, CMYK or Pantone

Screens want HEX or RGB. CMYK is for process printing, and Pantone comes in once a printer, embroiderer or manufacturer has to match a named ink. For a fan site or a chart, HEX alone is enough.

Pantone is overkill for most projects. Reach for it when a supplier asks for a PMS number.

When CMYK and Pantone Matter

Printing in CMYK means mixing four process inks, so one logo color can land differently on two presses.

Adobe's Illustrator help states that some RGB colors, neon shades among them, cannot be printed because CMYK has no equivalent, and the Color panel flags them with an alert triangle.

Running the HEX values through a Photoshop RGB to CMYK conversion shows the shift before anything goes to press.

Pantone adds a paper variable. PANTONE 3258 C and 3258 U share one ink formula but look different on coated and uncoated stock, per Enfocus documentation.

Every PMS number listed for these teams ends in C, so those values assume coated paper. On uncoated stock, ask for the U version before approving a proof.

Using Team Colors in Code

The nba-color package on npm (MIT license) returns a team's main and secondary colors as a hex string plus an RGB array. Lookups run by team abbreviation, upper or lower case, and an excluded abbreviation returns undefined. R users have colorr, whose nba.colors returns a vector of color strings for a chosen team.

Both packages return stored values, so a package published before a rebrand keeps returning the old palette. The nba-color README, for example, shows #702f8a for the Lakers' purple and #6f263d for Cleveland's main color, and neither matches the current palettes above. Check any package's hex values against current palettes before shipping.

Why Do NBA Team Color Codes Differ From Site to Site?

Reference sites build their tables from logo files and Pantone numbers, and often from each other, and nothing forces those sources to agree. The mismatches show up inside single pages.

Mismatches You Can Check Yourself

Take Thunder blue. Team Color Codes and Design Your Way both pair HEX #007AC1 with RGB (0, 125, 195), but converting #007AC1 returns (0, 122, 193), which is the value Color Picker Code publishes.

The Trail Blazers' black has a similar problem. Team Color Codes lists HEX #000000 beside RGB (6, 25, 34), and Coloropedia repeats that pair across several teams.

The pattern points to RGB triplets converted from the Pantone number while the HEX comes from the logo file. A Pantone to RGB converter is the quickest way to test that.

Why Tables Go Stale

Reference tables still list Cleveland navy, although the Cavaliers eliminated navy from their palette in June 2022 (NBA.com, 2022).

Values published by the team beat every workaround. Charlotte released Pantone swatches with its 2013 color announcement (SportsLogos.Net, 2013), and where a team publishes nothing, every code on the web is an approximation.

How to Verify a Team Color Code

Start from the team itself, since a rebrand release or published brand guidelines beat any third-party table.

1. Find the date of the team's last rebrand or uniform reveal and discard any table older than it.
2. Convert the HEX to RGB yourself and compare it with the listed triplet.
3. Check the Pantone number against a second source and confirm the C or U suffix.
4. Proof against a printed swatch before any print run.

NBA Team Colors FAQ

Can I use NBA team colors on my own website or products?

The colors by themselves carry little risk. Team names, logos and wordmarks are trademarked, though, and putting them on anything you sell takes a license from the league or the team. Ask a trademark lawyer before you print anything. None of this is legal advice.

Do any NBA teams share the same primary color?

They do. Red is the obvious one, since the Chicago Bulls, Houston Rockets and Toronto Raptors all use #CE1141 as a main color, along with other teams. What keeps them apart is the secondary colors and logo shapes, and sometimes the shade itself, like the Trail Blazers' #E03A3E.

Does the NBA logo use team colors?

No. The league logo has its own red and blue, separate from any franchise palette. Reference sites list the red as #C8102E, though they also note that the league's brand guidelines don't state those numbers explicitly, so treat them as close matches.

Do NBA teams use their own fonts for jersey lettering?

Many do, with custom typefaces. Wordmarks and jersey numerals are generally custom artwork, not retail fonts, and because the lettering is proprietary the best you can do is approximate it with look-alike fonts.

Do G League affiliates wear the same colors as their NBA team?

Often, though not by rule. Utah's affiliate, the Salt Lake City Stars, switched to Mountain Purple, Sky Blue and Midnight Black for 2025-26, the same palette the Jazz adopted (Sports Illustrated, 2025). Check each affiliate's own brand release.

Pairing NBA Team Colors Without Clashing

Safe pairings come down to contrast. WCAG 2.2 Level AA asks for a ratio of 4.5:1 on body text and 3:1 on large text (W3C, WCAG 2.2 Level AA, Success Criterion 1.4.3), and large text means 18 point, or 14 point bold.

Calculated from their published HEX codes, Oklahoma City Thunder blue (#007AC1) on white scores 4.61:1 and passes at body size. Portland Trail Blazers red (#E03A3E) on white scores 4.34:1, so it fails at body size and passes only for headlines.

Red type on black clears 4.5:1 for the Trail Blazers (4.84:1), which makes black the safer background for small text in that palette.

The cost is that body copy ends up in neutral black or white, which pushes the team color into things like headings, borders and buttons. Recheck the ratios after any rebrand. These results were verified in November 2026.