Shortly after the announcement that Jerry West, the Hall of Fame basketball participant and government, had died at age 86 on Wednesday, the N.B.A. emailed a statement to the information media from Adam Silver, the league’s commissioner, extolling the virtues of Mr. West as “a basketball genius” who contributed to each aspect of the league over a interval of greater than 60 years.
Just above the assertion was a picture of the league’s iconic brand: A rounded rectangle, blue on one aspect, pink on the opposite, with a white silhouette of a participant dribbling up the center.
In conserving with one of many league’s oddest traditions, no acknowledgment was made that the person dribbling on the high of the assertion was, the truth is, Mr. West.
It had as soon as been one of many worst stored secrets and techniques in sports activities. The N.B.A. employed Alan Siegel — the branding knowledgeable who created Major League Baseball’s brand — to create a brand for the league in 1969 and he primarily based the picture off {a photograph} of Mr. West, who was a star participant for the Los Angeles Lakers on the time.
The N.B.A. didn’t announce that the emblem depicted Mr. West, nevertheless it was apparent sufficient to individuals within the basketball world for Mr. West to ultimately be saddled with a nickname that carried extraordinary weight: The Logo.
Mr. West usually claimed that he wouldn’t need to presume the emblem was made in his likeness, and for years the league’s commissioners danced across the problem. But in an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 2010, Mr. Siegel, who was paid $14,000 for the emblem, left no room for doubt: “It’s Jerry West,” he stated.
Mr. Siegel claimed on the time to have traced one in all Wen Roberts’s images for the picture, however he would later soften that stance, saying in a Q. and A. with NBA.com that, “It isn’t him actually, however primarily based on his fashion of dribbling and transferring.”
There have sometimes been pushes to alter the emblem over time — a few of them coming from Mr. West himself — however the picture has endured. The closest the league had beforehand come to confirming that the emblem depicts Mr. West was in 2021, when Mr. Silver playfully stated, “While it’s by no means been formally declared that the emblem is Jerry West, it certain appears so much like him.”
But on Wednesday, with the information sinking in that the N.B.A. had misplaced one in all its best icons — and its literal icon — Mr. Silver went additional, saying that Mr. West had clearly impressed the picture.
“The N.B.A. brand was created lengthy earlier than I joined the league however there was by no means any doubt in my thoughts, or in Jerry West’s, that his picture was the inspiration for it,” Mr. Silver stated. “But Jerry additionally made clear that he was uncomfortable being often called ‘The Logo.’ He felt that the emblem ought to stand for one thing greater than him.
“Typical Jerry.”
