The Patch

Let's face it. So far this season, the Wizards stink. It's either poor coaching, poor roster assembly, lack of effort, lack of caring or all of the above which has gotten the team off to a 3-9 start through last night's victory agains the Miami Heat in southern Florida. Tied with the Atlanta Hawks was not where I thought we'd be 12 games in. 

By the way, it's definitely at least poor roster assembly.

From the opening tip against Miami in the season opener at Capital One Arena on October 18 to the final buzzer last night at American Airlines Arena, the mood of Wizards fans and Wizards Twitter has been like a pendulum the last month. Calls of "Fire Ernie!" (they should, and I mean now) and "Fire Scotty!" (they should soon unless...) and critiques like "John Wall looks out of shape" (he does) and "the Wizards don't like each other and that's why they look like they don't care" have turned to guarded optimism after just one road win against a maybe playoff hopeful. I actually saw one tweet this morning proclaiming the Wizards as a title contender. Not sure how beating the 2018 version of the Miami Heat gets you to championship hopeful but that's where some Wizards fans are right now. I feel their pain. Truly.

And don't worry, that situation will likely correct itself this week.

About a week and a half ago, the Wizards released some news about their jerseys for the young season and it was about as good and bad as the team has been so far this year. Just hours apart the team revealed this year's fourth jersey (dubbed by Nike as the City Edition just like last year) and then announced they would be joining 27 of the other 29 teams (Indiana and Oklahoma City are the lone holdouts) in the NBA in slapping advertisements on their threads for this season and presumably forever.

A close up look at this year's Wizards City Edition jersey.

Let's cover the good really quickly then move on to the point of this post. This year's City Edition uniforms are exactly the same as last year's but instead of being mostly white, they are mostly black. I think Wizards Twitter about exploded when these things were revealed. In the midst of pretty much the maximum level of angst experienced by Wizards fans (the team was 1-6 at the time) this year's fourth uni got almost universal praise. I'm not as psyched about black uniforms as just about everyone else in the D.C. area I guess. I think they are OK. If nothing else, the Washington Monument shows up way better on the sides of the jerseys than it did on the whites last year. It's also going to be really difficult for me to not buy the truly excellent City Edition black with red D.C. flag t-shirt that Nike brought out to accompany these things though.

Now that's out of the way, let's talk about jersey sponsorships. I knew this day would one day come when the Wizards would cave and let some company pay some money to slap their advertisement on the Wizards jerseys but it doesn't mean I have to like it. This stinks. It's purely a money grab because the league can. The press release announced this news as "more than a patch" and they are absolutely correct. It's a violation, it's unnecessary, it's ugly and it just plain sucks. I thought when the Wizards finally did this that I would roll over, having been desensitized to this stuff by 27 prior franchises. I didn't. It's truly terrible. I hate it. The only thing worse about the jersey patch is I know there's no going back.

And yes, this is all about the principle of the thing. It's not at all about GEICO, the company who the Wizards are allowing to befoul their jerseys. I actually love GEICO. When I was first trying to get car insurance for myself they were the only insurance company willing to let me buy insurance despite a flawless driving record and I've been with them ever since. But their name does not belong on my basketball team's jersey any more than GE belongs on the Boston Celtics jerseys or Zatarain's belongs on the New Orleans Pelicans jerseys or Bumble belongs on the Los Angeles Clippers jerseys. 

OK, the Bumble thing is pretty appropriate.

The Wizards aren't the only team afflicted with the GEICO ad on their jersey. The brand new Capital City Go-Go also get an extra large sponsorship from my favorite insurance company on their kit every game this season. I'm not so upset about this branding. There's no way the G-League makes money for the NBA owners and ads have been rampant in the NBA's development system for years. I actually find the GEICO wording less objectionable than the "Capital City" wording on the team's blue jerseys. Could they have found a worse font for these things? I'm not sure they could.

But the team that really got screwed by this partnership (remember...it's more than a patch) are the Washington Mystics. Sure, advertisements looks awful on NBA jerseys but if we had to have them, they couldn't really have made them any smaller and the GEICO fits in pretty well into the space on the left shoulder. Ditto for the Go-Go branding but at least they put the GEICO at the bottom of the jersey which allowed the name of the city (sort of...I still don't like the Capital City name) and the team nickname to be where it belongs on the shirt. But the Mystics jerseys look like they are playing on the GEICO company basketball team.

Look, I get the WNBA takes a back seat to the NBA and apparently also the G-League. But unless you have some kind of great seats or some kind of great eyes, it's going to be difficult to tell that you are rooting for the Mystics or the city of Washington when you are at a game. Sure the name (in logo form) is still on the jersey, but it's about as big as the GEICO logo on the NBA version although the font size is way smaller. 

I know the Mystics are not the only WNBA team to have this happen to them. In fact most of the teams are using this same strategy of having the sponsorship across the top of the uniform and the team logo on the shoulder. Notable exceptions include the Chicago Sky who have sold advertising space both across the top of the jersey AND on the shoulder (and so have no team identification at all) and the Las Vegas Aces who are using the NBA model with the team name where it belongs and a small advertisement on the shoulder.

The reason the Mystics can't use the Go-Go style of design is that the bottom of all the WNBA jerseys features the Verizon logo. But I don't see why the Mystics can't force the GEICO logo into the same spot that the NBA places it just like the Aces have done. How much is GEICO really paying for the WNBA sponsorship anyway?

Call me old-fashioned. Call me resistant to change. Call me just plain old and stuck in the past. But I don't like these things one bit. I've been watching teams playing European soccer with very large advertisements across their chests for as long as I can remember and I guess I accept that. But there's no good reason for the NBA to do this except to generate slightly more (and I do mean slightly more) revenue. I hate this. Thank God they are still selling jerseys without the ads. Although considering the Wizards performance the last couple of years, I'm sticking with my old Adidas John Wall jersey for as long as I can I'm thinking.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming. Fire Ernie!

Jersey Patches

I can't believe it's March and I haven't published a blog post about the advertising patches that have been popping up on NBA jerseys all over the United States (Canada too, I guess, but just in one spot, not all over) in the last six months or so. I'm using last week's announcements by the Dallas Mavericks with 5miles and the Los Angeles Clippers with Bumble as an excuse to remedy that situation. Before I start ranting in earnest, let me say the Clips couldn't have picked a more perfectly named partner.

Want to know how I feel about advertisements on jerseys? Well, I'm going to tell you anyway. Quite frankly, I hate them. But I'm going to try to be a bit more nuanced in this post and soften my stance a little. We'll see how that goes.

Maybe a little history is in order. If you watch soccer on TV, you will probably struggle to recall a time in the last 30 years when the teams you were watching did NOT have a sponsor company's name emblazoned across their chests. That's because sponsorship deals for European football clubs have been standard fixtures since the 1980s. I can't recall any across the jerseys of my favorite teams growing up in England but that's because the first club in major English soccer latched on to this idea in 1979, the year I left the country.

I don't, despite my earlier statement about hating these things, object to advertisements on soccer jerseys as much as I feel I should. Maybe it's because there are, in most cases, just one company's logo on the shirts. Maybe it's because traditionally there were no jersey numbers of team names on the fronts of the shirts. Adding a logo was just filling blank space on the shirt. It didn't require any adjustment to the other parts of the uniform.

For the most part, this single endorsement rule has held up, although recently, there have been secondary advertisements popping up on the sleeves of some teams, like the Huddersfield Town jersey shown above. I like this less. Some sports have gone to a more extreme level. My favorite rugby league team, Wakefield Trinity, puts on jerseys for each game that are covered in advertisements. How many are there on that jersey? Nine? Ten? More? It's craziness. Way too much.

Soccer is, not surprisingly, the dominant sport in England and most of the rest of the world. Over the last three plus decades, revenues from jersey advertisements have poured in to add cash to the vaults of clubs whose games at the time when they were adopting advertisements on their kits were largely not televised. I'm sure they helped out a ton financially.

Fast forward 20 or so years to the United States. Major League Soccer, the third or fourth attempt at professional soccer in this country, decided to introduce jersey advertisements into their league. They are the first major professional sports league in the USA to do this. For the purposes of this blog post, I'm considering major sports leagues here at home to be MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL, MSL and WNBA. Debate that list if you feel you need to.

For me, this introduction of jersey advertisements in this league in 2007 is fairly seamless. We as consumers were already softened up to this idea by the rest of the world and, again, the ads are not taking away from anything on the uniform. There's nothing where the sponsor name is going.

Four years later, the WNBA would introduce advertisements onto their uniforms. I'm surprised it took that long. Honestly, if there's a league in need of all the advertising revenue it can handle, it's the WNBA. These advertisements probably literally saved a few franchises from going out of existence. My philosophical objection to a single (or maybe two in some cases) advertisement on a jersey to help a franchise or league from going bankrupt is waived. I'm all for this.

Then last year, on the heels of one of the richest television deals in major sports history, the NBA decides it needs more money and allows its 30 teams to negotiate deals with sponsors to advertise in the space on the jersey on the left chest. This comes in conjunction with the new uniform deal negotiated with Nike which includes, for the first time, the right for the jersey manufacturer to add their logo to the NBA jerseys.

The Lending Tree advertisement is unreadable from a distance. Too many letters and not enough space.

So first, let me say the NBA does not need this money. Maybe that's not a good argument for them not pursuing it. But it's totally unnecessary for the NBA team's owners to do this from a monetary standpoint. 

Second, I know it's not requiring anything moving around on the uniform, so based on my argument about soccer jerseys, I should be OK with adding something, right? Not so much. There's too little space in the spot where the league has designated the ads be restricted to. Some look just plain awkward and some are about impossible to read. Does that make the ones that fit well or are graphically clear more acceptable? Oddly enough and surprisingly, for me the answer is yes. Before you get all up in arms about this, just read on. There just aren't many that satisfy this criteria for me.

So far, 21 of the NBA's 30 teams have elected to sell advertising space on their jerseys. The Golden State Warriors are getting $20 million per season from Japanese company Rakuten. That's the richest deal by far. The second most money generated from a club selling its soul for money is a reported $7 to $10 million per year to the Cleveland Cavaliers from nearby Akron, Ohio based Goodyear. It goes down from there. The split of this money by the way is half to the players, a quarter to the rest of the teams and a quarter to the team whose unis sport the logo.

Among the 21 companies who have bought in, there are some banks, some software companies, some internet apps, Western Union, Harley Davidson, Disney, Fitbit, a couple of food companies and the charity arm of a software developer in addition to the two companies mentioned in the paragraph above. Are any of these sponsorships acceptable in any way to me? Reluctantly, I have to say yes.

Maybe I'm getting soft in my old age but I find from a local business standpoint Harley Davidson (in Milwaukee),  Zatarain's (in New Orleans) and Disney (in Orlando) appropriate for sponsoring these teams. I've written posts in the past on this blog ranking team names. I've always thought highly of teams with names with local origins. I'm appreciative of teams making local connections with businesses, although I hate the orange of the Harley Davidson logo on the decidedly non-orange Bucks jerseys and Disney is becoming way too big and powerful. Too much Disney these days.

I also appreciate the Utah Jazz partnering with a charity (5 For The Fight, which raises money to combat cancer) and on a totally different level the Philadelphia 76ers partnering with StubHub and the Minnesota Timberwolves hooking up with Fitbit. At least these two products and services relate to sports or athletics in some way.

Hate to say it but if I had to have a jersey patch on my uniform, the Goodyear patch is one of the best.

Graphically speaking (I'm an architect after all), I can't get on board with many of these jersey ads because they either just don't fit well into the space provided (particularly the horizontal advertisements with a lot of letters like the Charlotte Hornets' Lending Tree patch which is just unreadable) or the colors clash with the team's colors a la Harley Davidson in Milwaukee. In the end I've boiled this whole thing down to two acceptable patches: the Goodyear one on the Cavs' jerseys (I appreciate the way the company altered their colors to the Cavs' admittedly awful color scheme) and the StubHub one on the Philadelphia 76ers unis. Both are acceptably shaped to fit into the available uniform space and have some local or topical tie to the franchise or league.

I am grateful that the Washington Wizards have not sold out and allowed some company to post their logo on our gorgeous uniforms (particularly the home whites). It makes me feel like there is something worth believing in about this franchise in the midst of a mini-collapse without John Wall. On the other hand, I'm dying for some influx of cash so die-hard fans like me don't have to pay more for season tickets next year. In the end though, even with $20 million extra cash like the Warriors have per year and which the Wizards won't get, spreading that revenue out between the players, the rest of the teams and 20,000 fans or so to discount season tickets would only get the average fan a savings of $250 per seat per year. I think I'd rather have our unis advertisement free. Although any help I can get on season tickets would be appreciated too. Less than two weeks to decide.