Toronto Raptors draft hat leak has fans speculating about logo, jersey changes
Deep into another Toronto Raptors offseason, it appears we’ve hit another summer milestone: time to speculate about jerseys.
SportsLogos.Net flagged that Dick’s Sporting Goods has officially shared 22 of the 30 NBA Draft Hats available for purchase this year, with the Raptors notably absent from the already released list.
One of those teams not shown on the site — the Orlando Magic — dropped a full rebrand of their logos and uniforms on Tuesday.
That has led to some speculation that the team could be fuelling a full or partial rebrand, particularly with what appears to be a photo of the team’s draft hat posted by Reddit user Heroics_, which matches the style of the other NBA hats this year.
Every year since 2004, the Raptors’ official draft hat has been primarily red, white, or black, going away from the team’s initial purple colours. And while there’s still some red on the logo, it appears that purple will be adorning Toronto’s draft hat this year.
The Raptors have added purple to their draft hat for the first time since 2004
byu/Heroics_ intorontoraptors
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With the draft often a key time to float new jersey concepts and uniform changes, there’s a bit of buzz being generated as to what exactly the purple text could mean for the Raptors.
And Raptors fans are pretty used to digging for clues for their uniforms.
Last year, the Raptors’ social media and marketing teams were constantly teasing purple jerseys, before eventually bringing them back in the 2024-25 season as part of the team’s 30th anniversary celebrations.
However, the new jersey wasn’t a total rebrand, as some fans had expected, since their familiar red-and-black uniforms still dominated their choices at both home and away games.
Unlike other sports, the NBA doesn’t differentiate between home and away uniforms, but has five or six different options: the Association, the Icon, the Statement, the Classic, and the City edition jerseys.
The City edition jerseys are usually special edition jerseys worn for a year at a time, the Classics are based on previous editions — like the Raptors’ purple jerseys — and the other three are, well, three different colours based on the team’s choices.
While we don’t know exactly what the purple on the draft hats means, we can bet that the speculation won’t stop until we figure out what’s coming next for the team’s uniforms.