Ranking the best and worst NBA All-Star jerseys of past 25 seasons

I'm sorry, but text that slopes downward and diagonally just doesn't feel appropriate anywhere outside the world of hockey. The color scheme isn't anything egregious — red, white and blue is quite typical — but I don't really understand why we felt the need to merge basketball and hockey. The NBA must have seen the flaw and never went for diagonal lettering in another contest.

Thankfully, these uniforms weren't used during perhaps the coolest part of the weekend, as LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh, Dwyane Wade and the rest of the star-studded 2004 draft class — Darko Milicic, unsurprisingly, didn't make the cut — teamed up for the Rookie Challenge game.

In an effort to put players' first and last names on the backs of the All-Star jerseys — for some reason — these designs also happened to incorporate an incredibly boring color scheme. It was a tandem of bad ideas that didn't work and, to be honest, didn't make sense.

I can understand using nicknames on the backs of jerseys for a fun event, but what do first names add to the picture? These are the biggest names in the league, so you're more than likely to know that the "James" who's throwing down a ferocious dunk is LeBron and isn't former NFL running back Edgerrin James or "Paul Blart" portrayer Kevin James.

It's a no from me, but at least they weren't as bad as the concept for Christmas Day action that year.

The 2017 All-Star Game was supposed to be held in Charlotte, but a late change centered around North Carolina's controversial "House Bill 2" moved the event to New Orleans.

The fact that the designs may have needed to change drastically is understandable. The results of that design process, however, weren't. I don't get the color scheme at all. It's all over the place, more so with the darker uniform than the lighter one.

The other aspect of this All-Star weekend to disappoint was the Slam Dunk Contest, in which Glenn Robinson III — bet you didn't remember that one, did you? — took home the win in a contest that completely paled in comparison to Aaron Gordon and Zach LaVine's dunk-off from the year prior.

Is anything more '90s NBA than these jerseys, aside from maybe the "Space Jam" jerseys from the same year?

Both are examples of a cartoon-ish fusion into pro hoops, and Michael Jordan rocked both extremely well. The fact that these mid-'90s gems are often seen at "darties" — for you old folk, those are parties held during the daytime where you'll probably end up seeing more than a few fraternity brothers attempting to show off their jersey collections — should tell you that it's one of the most memorable and beloved designs.

However, it also marked the end of city-specific jersey designs, so perhaps they weren't as universally beloved as I'd have thought. It would be wrong of me not to acknowledge another awesome set of threads from that era, though it missed our 25-year cutoff.

Jordan, at around 40 years old, took part in an All-Star Game for the 14th and final time of his career, so it was only right that the jerseys served as a nice tribute to the era he helped to define. These are so simple that it's hard to pick out the exact reason why they work so well. Looking at them makes me feel as though I just dug through some old boxes in my basement and dusted off a piece of special NBA nostalgia that just has some sort of mystical quality to it.

The presence of multiple stars throughout the design, the classic block font, the NBA logo sitting proudly on the front ... it all just works.