If you’re like me, you’re eagerly anticipating the start of the NBA postseason. But if you are like me – if you’re an NBA fan who’s a millennial or older – you’re awaiting these games while knowing in the back of your head that something is going to be missing from them. It’s not a critical something, it’s not something that’s going to keep you from watching and enjoying these games, but it’s not insignificant either. It’s a piece of these games that you can sense, deep down, should fundamentally be there, and its absence sneaks up on you every once in a while. It’s something small and something kitschy, but it’s something you absolutely, positively feel should be a part of these games again. And that something is on-court logos that say “PLAYOFFS” and “FINALS” for regular postseason games and NBA Finals games respectively.
Those logos graced the floor of NBA playoff games for over two decades starting in 1991. At first, they featured the year above the words “NBA PLAYOFFS” or “NBA FINALS”, but eventually they lost the year element and were shortened to just say “PLAYOFFS” and “THE FINALS” – and briefly “EASTERN CONFERENCE FINALS” and “WESTERN CONFERENCE FINALS.”
Then, in 2015, the NBA ditched them, with the primary reason being that the decals they appeared on could sometimes be slippery for the players. “There were a lot of considerations taken into account in making this decision, including player safety,” an NBA spokesman was quoted as explaining in a 2015 piece by The Cauldron. “We haven’t received any complaints about the decals from teams or players this season, but it was among the factors we discussed … We decided to remove the playoffs logo from the court for a variety of reasons, including cleaning up the playing surface.”
From the outside, you can understand why the NBA made that decision, as the logos weren’t saying anything that people didn’t already know and the material that was plastered onto the court for them had the slight potential to cause an injury. To a risk-averse league like the NBA, it makes sense why the ceremonial merits of those logos got sacrificed at the moment they were being challenged.
At the same time, it’s not like the league couldn’t still put those logos on the court if they really wanted to without using decals. Paint still exists, after all, and so long as those logos can be on the court, they unquestionably, undoubtedly, certifiably should be for the very simple reason that NBA fans loved them.
The reason so many NBA fans started nodding when they saw the headline for this article is the same reason they’d start nodding if this article was instead about why a giant Larry O’Brien trophy should return to the halfcourt of NBA Finals games: those logos made the games feel important.
The NBA is not like the NFL or MLB, it’s not a sport where the playing surface differs in type or size or shape depending on where it’s been played. It’s not a sport where the weather or time of day comes into play either. Basketball, quite simply, is a sport where you’re staring at wood – pretty much the same wood – over and over and over again, which can get very, very monotonous.
And so, when the playoffs began and those courts suddenly had PLAYOFFS logos on them, that simple addition was enough to make the games feel special, not unlike how bunting flags make certain MLB games feel special. It was as though the NBA had busted out the special china that you only ever eat on on special occasions. It felt like the NBA was going out of its way to differentiate those games from regular season games, which made what we were watching feel more significant.
Even as a kid, when I’d play an NBA video game and the simulated season I was playing reached the postseason, I remember how cool it felt to finally see the 3D renderings of those PLAYOFFS logos on the screen, and how much it felt like I had actually accomplished something. And that’s something that’s not an isolated experience either; that’s a connection that tons of fans had for years with these logos that, on paper, might have seemed inessential.
The reason to bring the logos back isn’t merely for nostalgia purposes though – it’s because the branding they provided is legitimately missing from modern NBA playoff games. Over the last few years, one of the chief complaints that fans have had about the Finals is that they didn’t look or feel that important. They look… ordinary.
The NBA is the same league that has done everything in its power to differentiate in-season tournament games from regular season games – turning the entire courts green or red or blue or so on – and yet ironically, counter-intuitively, they have put almost no effort whatsoever into making its most important postseason games stand out aesthetically from the games that were played in October and December and March. It’s like the league took it for granted that everyone would self-manifest these games feeling special to them from now on when the reality is that they only felt as large as they did because the league themselves was reinforcing how special they were.
Perhaps realizing the mistake they were making, the NBA’s thinking appears to have shifted a bit in the last few years. Not only did the league return the NBA Finals’ logo font to cursive again, as it had been for decades until recently, but the last couple of NBA Finals have featured digital projections of the Finals logo on both halves of the court like they were placed in the old days. However, the league has gotten no credit for this, nor should they for the very simple reason that those digital on-court projections are about as charming to look at as rotting garbage.
They’re the antithesis of special; they look jittery and cheap and lame, especially considering the league’s gross, distracting decision to insert as many ads as possible during these games, including putting one for YouTube TV underneath their Finals logo – which gives the impression that the league is showcasing that logo again more to show off that YouTube TV insignia than because they actually want to make the games feel bigger.
If the NBA is indeed going to have some semblance of these logos on the court during Finals games, and to their credit they appear to recognize they should, then they need to go all the way and put the FINALS logo back on the court for real – sans tacky YouTube TV affixture, sans other on-court ads that take away from it (probably a nonstarter, but oh well) – and then do the same with PLAYOFFS logos in the games leading up to them. Half measures will get the league no love whatsoever, and if anything, only inspire further comparisons about how much better the NBA playoffs’ aesthetics used to be as opposed to how they are now.
At the end of the day, the NBA has very, very few traditions. Everything is always changing in the NBA: the pace, the style of play, the people playing it, the colors and uniforms that the teams are wearing, the teams who are rivals with another team, etc. Everything is fleeting and nothing is sacred. Even the ball that the NBA uses changed radically not that long ago.
Those PLAYOFFS and FINALS logos, as weird as it might sound, were one of the only constants in the entire league; they were something you expected to be there, something that spanned a quarter of a century – from Michael Jordan’s first championship run to LeBron James’ final year in Miami. The NBA doesn’t have to revive them – and I mean actually revive them, not digitally – but the amount of goodwill and affection that they’d engender among fans by doing so would justify whatever meager costs it would take a hundred times over.
The NBA playoffs can survive without these logos just as the Finals could survive without the logo having a cursive type print again, but it’s something the league should bring back for no other reason than because they can and because it’d make fans happy. And, also, it’d be nice to support a league that needs no greater justification than that to make their product not quite as chock full of ads as it could be.
