NY is the big apple or the City that never sleeps. So if they had some Apple City unis it would be a rip off.
I remember when Rip Hamilton was on the Pistons and Detroit fans thought we ripped Rip City off of him, lol.
No, I'm talking shit like Loud City and Clutch City and Hot City and Bitch City and all that crap that 28 NBA cities think they need to have all of a sudden... and I doubt it's because of Detroit's massive success in the playoffs.
Looks like 2013. http://www.nba.com/pistons/news/detroit-pistons-unveil-first-ever-motor-city-uniforms Looks like we premiered the Rip City uniform in 2002: http://uniformcritics.com/basketball/nba/portland-trail-blazers/rip-city-alternate-uni/
If we were the first to do the "___ City" nickname on our jerseys, all the others are rip offs, I don't care how long Detroit has been called motor city.
The part that makes it even more lame is that the phrase "Rip City" didn't even start out as a description of Portland, it was Schonz getting excited about the sound the net was making when we were scoring at will. It really is a description of how the team was playing at the time. We do use it to describe the city now but that came later on. If we wanted to do a "city" jersey like everyone else we'd do the Rose City. Thus we are still the original and way cooler than everyone else. On a side note, 2 or 3 years ago we played Detroit and they were wearing their Motor City jerseys and we had the Rip City jerseys on and it looked bad ass!