RIP The Logo (Jerry West est morte) (1 Viewer)

[El Caliente]

NBA legend Jerry West dies at age 86

One of basketball's most accomplished contributors, West was a staple of the sport across eight decades, winning nine championships as a player, scout, coach, executive and consultant.

sports.yahoo.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

anyone happen to know the story of how his picture and that particular picture became the league's logo?

or what some of the other contenders were?

 

[guidomerkinsrules]

Wow that’s big

I imagine this will be mentioned before the next playoff game

 

[El Caliente]

Wow that’s big

I imagine this will be mentioned before the next playoff game

And expect Lebron to issue a statement, and ESPN to run a 5 hour segment on Jerry West’s passings impact on Lebron…and the Lakers.

 

[Sun Wukong]

anyone happen to know the story of how his picture and that particular picture became the league's logo?

or what some of the other contenders were?

He was playing in a game and briefly turned into a featureless white silhouette while dribbling the ball. One of the all time great sports photos up there with Ali standing over Liston.

 

[Optimus Prime]

The NBA has never officially acknowledged that its classic red, white and blue logo was modeled after Jerry West, the Los Angeles Lakers legend who died Wednesday at 86, but the man who designed it leaves no doubt.

“It’s Jerry West,” Alan Siegel told the Los Angeles Times in 2010.

In 1969, NBA Commissioner J. Walter Kennedy hired Siegel’s branding agency to design a new logo for the league. Kennedy was impressed with the work Siegel had done in overseeing Jerry Dior’s design of Major League Baseball’s 100th anniversary logo, which featured a red, white and blue silhouette of a batter.
“[Kennedy] wanted a logo that had a family relationship to Major League Baseball, because the NBA’s reputation had been tarnished by many players who had taken drugs, and basketball had slipped behind the reputation of baseball,” Siegel said in 2011.

Siegel was searching for inspiration for his NBA logo when he called up his childhood friend and fellow Cornell graduate Dick Schaap. The legendary sportswriter and broadcaster was working as an editor at Sport magazine at the time and gave Siegel access to the publication’s photo archives.

Siegel, who played high school basketball with Hall of Fame coach Larry Brown, was immediately drawn to a photo of West by Wen Roberts, who became the Lakers’ official photographer when the franchise relocated from Minneapolis to Los Angeles before the 1960-61 season.

“It had a nice flavor to it, so I took that picture and we traced it,” Siegel said of the photograph, which depicted West dribbling the ball with his left hand. “It was perfect. It was vertical, and it had a sense of movement. It was one of those things that just clicked.”

Siegel, who considered West one of his favorite players and said he once played against him in a high school All-Star Game, designed the logo with his partner, Bob Gale, “in maybe an hour” and presented it to the NBA the next day. It was approved.

“I charged $14,000,” Siegel told NBA.com in 2021. “It was not a lot of money, but it was a prestigious assignment and I never gave it a second thought.”

The league’s new logo was introduced the same year West was named MVP of the NBA Finals and presented a Dodge Charger R/T by Sport magazine, despite the fact that his Lakers lost in seven games to the Boston Celtics. Siegel said no one asked whether West was the inspiration for the design at the time.

“That looks like somebody familiar,” West told the Times of his reaction when he first saw the logo...........

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2024/06/12/jerry-west-nba-logo-history/

 

[Optimus Prime]

............“While it’s never been officially declared that the logo is Jerry West, it sure looks a lot like him,” Silver said with a smile.

West rarely acknowledged happiness or contentment with any of his achievements during his long public life in basketball, and his involvement in the logo was no exception.

In an interview with ESPN in 2017, West said he would be happy if the NBA took him out of the logo — if indeed he was actually the player in it, West said.

“It is flattering, but to me, I played in the time when they first started to try to market the league,” West said. “There were five people they were going to consider. I didn’t find out about it until the late commissioner told me about it, Walter Kennedy. ... I don’t like to do anything to call attention to myself, and when people say that, that’s just not who I am, period. If they would want to change it, I wish they would. In many ways, I wish they would.”.........

Jerry West was the inspiration for the NBA logo, but he was conflicted about the honor

Jerry West will be forever be referred to in basketball circles as “The Logo.” His silhouette is the basis for the NBA logo introduced in 1969, although the league never formally acknowledged it.

apnews.com

 

[SaintInBucLand]

Since West just died I think it would be in bad taste to replace him immediately, but I think in the coming years it would me cool to honor somebody with a new logo.. Most preferably Kobe, just because of his huge impacts on the sport and his early and tragic passing.