Miami Heat bring back ‘Vice’ jerseys after nearly five-year absence

Someone alert Tubbs and Crockett.

The Miami Heat announced on Thursday that it is bringing back its popular “Vice” jerseys after a nearly five-year hiatus.

The uniforms, inspired by the 1980s Miami Vice television series and the Heat’s former arena, ran from 2018 to 2021. They will return for the team’s Jan. 17 matchup with the Denver Nuggets and replace Miami’s standard white Association jerseys for the rest of the season. 

The Vice series was launched during the 2017-18 season when the NBA and Nike overhauled the uniforms for all 30 teams, including new “City Edition” jerseys meant to represent each team’s cities uniquely. While the New Orleans Pelicans nodded to the city’s Mardi Gras celebration and the New York Knicks incorporated the shield of the New York City Fire Department, the Heat opted for a jersey scheme that spotlighted the vibrant and colorful 1980s and 1990s culture of the Miami: a white base with fuchsia pink “Miami” script written in cursive across the jersey chest and blue gale-colored numbering.

Of all the City Edition jerseys, the Heat’s Vice uniforms stood out the most. The first edition became a fashion piece for those who could get their hands on it and later spawned copycats across different sports teams. It was also a financial windfall for the franchise: a team spokesperson said nearly 230,000 Vice jerseys have been sold since 2018, totaling $25 million in sales.

Vice was always intended to be a four-year series, starting with the white jersey—the lone returning jersey—before transitioning to black, fuchsia pink and blue. Based on the run’s success, the Heat added a fifth colorway for the 2020-21 season, which combined the previous four entries.

For this season’s return, there will be no updates to the white jersey; it’ll be the same one that debuted in 2018.

“No changes, no updates,” said Michael McCullough, the Heat’s chief marketing officer. “You don’t need to touch a classic.” 

So why bring back the “Vice” jerseys now? For multiple reasons, McCullough said.

For one, they wanted to reward the fanbase for making Vice such a success. The run of Vice jerseys turned them from a simple uniform to a fashion statement; fans wore them to games and as ways to get their fits off. According to the Heat spokesperson, the team has sold over $40 million in Vice-based merchandise since 2018. Not to mention, “Vice” helped create a new identity and branding opportunity for not just the Heat but also other professional sports teams.

That latter point is another reason “Vice” was brought out of retirement: to remind the sports world who the originators are.

Everyone from food and beverage brands to other sports teams (AAU teams, Inter Miami CF, Florida International University football, the Miami Marlins) has adopted the pink, blue and white colorway. While the Heat were slightly annoyed by others’ use of their style, they didn’t go the NFL route of legally blocking other teams from using the colors.

“We created a monster,” McCullough said. “And while there’s a bunch of knockoffs, there’s only one original and that’s the original ‘Vice’.”

The Heat chose the white colorway because it was the original — the campaign for the jersey’s return is named “The Original Vice” — but also because it was the least produced of all the Vice series. Thirty-thousand white Vice jerseys were produced in 2018 compared to the black colorway, which was 75,000. There were so few of the white jerseys that not even McCullough was able to get one in his size.

“So if you got one of those white jerseys, that was like a unicorn,” he said.

What this wasn’t, though, McCullough said, was a do-over for the two series that succeeded “Vice” in the past four seasons.

After the “Vice” series ended in 2021, the Heat transitioned to its “Mashup” series, which combined elements of previous Heat uniforms over the team’s 30-year history. For the 2023-24 and 2024-25 seasons, they dropped two jerseys from their “Culture” series, which replaced the “Miami” on the front of jerseys with “Heat Culture,” the team’s unofficial mantra.

While Mashup outsold the Vice series and Culture had modest sales, neither matched the cultural impact of Vice. Fans compared the Mashup jerseys to the cutout letters of ransom notes, and Culture didn’t fare too much better: “Creating new Heat ‘City Edition’ jersey ideas that are (hopefully) better than the Heat Culture jerseys,” one Reddit post reads.

McCullough said the Mashup series sold well because, like Vice, it was a unique concept that departed from the team’s standard black, red and white colorway, a testament to their idea of the jerseys as fashion statements rather than team uniforms. On the other hand, Culture may not have caught on as well for two reasons.

First, replacing “Miami” with “Heat Culture” automatically loses tourists who want a keepsake from their time in the city. “So, you can come from Australia, and you want to go home with that cool Miami souvenir, it’s probably not going to be the ‘Heat Culture’ jersey because it doesn’t say ‘Miami,’ ” McCullough said.

Second, the Culture series used the team’s original colorway, which didn’t make it stand out from the standard jerseys. “It doesn’t make anybody go, ‘What the hell are they doing? Why do they have a pink uniform?’ ” he added.

Regardless, the team views any feedback as good feedback. McCullough constantly challenges his team to be bold and embrace designs that scare them. Their goal is always to make a statement—good or bad—and take risks, which is how Vice shook up the jersey industry in 2018.

“I’m super confident that we’re going to hit far more than we miss, and ‘Heat Culture’ has not been a miss by any stretch of the imagination,” McCullough said. “But we’re never going to shy away from using this uniform opportunity to tell a lot of different stories about who we are as a brand.”