Fourteen thousand dollars, a borrowed photo and about 30 minutes of approval. That was the budget behind the nba logo, one of the most famous marks in sports. In 1969, designer Alan Siegel drew the red, white and blue silhouette of a player on the move. The league has used the mark ever since.
The figure is Jerry West, the Los Angeles Lakers guard, though the NBA has never officially confirmed it. That gap sits at the heart of every argument about a redesign. The debate has followed the mark for decades, and it still flares whenever the league mourns or celebrates.
1969: A Commissioner, a Photo and a Deadline
The assignment came from commissioner J. Walter Kennedy, who wanted the mark to have a family relationship with Major League Baseball's logo, work Siegel already knew well. Siegel found the base image in the photo files of his friend, the editor Dick Schaap. It was a Wen Roberts picture of West that had run on a Sport Magazine cover. This connects to our earlier piece, How the Playoff Picture NFL Fans Track Breaks, Week by Week.
The image worked because it was vertical and full of motion, and Siegel deliberately avoided a dunking figure. He charged $14,000 and prepared 15 to 20 alternative sketches. Kennedy approved the main design in roughly half an hour, a pace no modern branding project would survive. Siegel later counted 67 logos around the world, across many sports, built partly on the design. Few corporate logos have ever moved from brief to approval that fast.
Jerry West: The Model the League Never Confirmed
West spent his career as the quiet man inside the league's loudest symbol. The Los Angeles Lakers themselves called him The Logo in tribute, and fans used the nickname for decades. Yet the NBA never confirmed West as the model. Reporting has tied that silence to copyright concerns, and Siegel kept the secret for years before the story surfaced.
The designer later admitted mild surprise that West seemed uneasy about the honor. In Siegel's view, the guard should feel pride in the symbol. For the league, the silence became policy: the logo belongs to everyone, so it officially belongs to no one player.
The Redesign Debate: Kobe, Kyrie and Tradition
The loudest push for change came after Kobe Bryant's death, when fans rallied around the idea of putting him on the mark, a campaign Brooklyn guard Kyrie Irving championed publicly. Petitions gathered huge attention, and the debate spread from social media to broadcast studios, with each new generation of stars feeding the argument.
Siegel answered the campaign directly. In his view, the nba logo should be promoted as a decades-old symbol of history and longevity, and a mark should not change without a compelling reason. Even David Stern, the commissioner who followed Kennedy, preferred a more abstract, non-player figure. He still left the mark alone, because it worked.
The league has answered the same way each time. It honors its past in ceremonies, jerseys and documentaries, while the main mark stays fixed. Fifty-plus years of use have made the case better than any memo could.
Why the NBA Logo Survives Every Push to Change It
The mark endures for practical reasons. It reads at any size, it carries no text and it sells a long league history in one glance. Redesigns cost money and invite backlash. They also risk cutting a brand away from its own story. The league has never seen a reason strong enough to accept those risks.
There is also the tribute problem. Crowning a new player means un-crowning an old one, and every shortlist restarts the argument the league prefers to avoid. The silence about West, awkward as it is, keeps the symbol neutral property in a league built on star power.
Time helps, too. The nba logo now reads as the league itself rather than as one man's likeness. That kind of familiarity takes decades to build, and a rebrand budget cannot buy it back once it is spent. For related coverage, see How the NFL Playoffs Work Now: Bracket, Seeding and Dates.
Conclusion: A Mark Built to Outlast Every Debate
The nba logo began as a fast, cheap piece of craft built from one borrowed photo. It became the visual signature of a global league. The redesign debate will return, because every anniversary and every loss revives it. But the mark has survived changing commissioners, fan campaigns and 50-plus years of fashion cycles. The safest bet in design says the silhouette dribbles on.
