Very simple. Very different. And very, very red.

The long-awaited unveiling of the Rockets' new uniforms slipped out on the Internet last week before the Rockets could orchestrate their debut.

"I'm very happy with them. I think they're great," Rockets vice president for marketing Tim McDougall said. "We had a couple goals going in. One was color. Color is the first thing people see and identify when they look at uniforms. We took a lot of care to see what fans identify with. Red was color people identify when they think of the Rockets. We started with that. The second goal was to have a clean, timeless and unique look to the Rockets design. I think we've got that." Other features of the uniforms include a fabric specifically designed for the Rockets uniform; a harsh, slashing font; the use of the team name, rather than 'Houston' on the front of the road uniforms.

"There are different things you can do, some to make people immediately like uniforms but that wear out over time," McDougall said. "We wanted something, a design, to wear for a long time. The most important thing was, `What works best over the long haul?' "

But if the Rockets got what they wanted in the design of their new look, they lost the chance of debuting the uniforms when an online sporting goods company posted photos of the jerseys and began taking orders.

The Rockets are still waiting for Reebok to supply a set of uniforms in order to unveil them, but they tentatively have planned an event for next week to show all team merchandise.

"I guess I could buy a couple and launch it that way," McDougall said. "It's frustrating to some extent. We'd love to have gotten it earlier in the summer. But ... the most important thing is to get it right for the long haul. I'll make that tradeoff any day. We'll launch sometime when we get the uniforms in house a little over a week from now."