The blossoms, though, are what make the court sing. David Stern, then the NBA commissioner, registered his displeasure with the blue-on-blue blurring, league officials have said.) (This plagued the Houston Rockets during the delightfully gaudy 1990s era of NBA design, when they colored large portions of their court blue - only to discover teams with blue road jerseys blended into the blue paint. The Wizards simulated what it would look like on television when pink-clad Washington players traversed the pink court - making sure players would not become over-camouflaged. "We did our due diligence there." Kyle Kuzma was a notable supporter, though officials made clear the pink theme predated (by a lot) Kuzma's now famous pregame oversized, pink sweater. "The pink is definitely something we took to the players," says Rebecca Winn, the Wizards' senior vice president for marketing. If you use your special ingredient too much, it can overwhelm everything." The Wizards even contemplated white blossom-themed jerseys with pink trim before diving head-long into pick uniforms, officials say. ![]() "We wanted to make sure it wasn't pink everywhere," Kacsur says. The court is unmistakably pink - you could probably describe it first as "a pink court" - without being too pink. In a perfect little flourish, single mini-blossoms dot "i"s in both "Washington" (on the baselines) and "district" (on the near sideline) - and sit atop the "d" in those "dc" corner logos in which the "d" is rendered as a reaching arm. ![]() The same pink appears in the top slice of the ball (which is usually red) and outlining the cherry blossoms along the baselines. They used it in the ball logo at center court, the lowercase "dc" corner icons, and the trim around the pink painted areas. It is meant to evoke the water in the Washington, D.C., Tidal Basin, the centerpiece of cherry blossom season. The shade of blue is new for the Wizards - brighter and warmer than their usual dark navy, Kacsur says. They chose the simplest solution: a mostly plain wooden court, matching pink painted areas, and blue trim all around. (The Wizards and Golden State Warriors played two preseason games in Japan this fall.) Courtesy Washington Wizards Some of the draft boundaries featured Japanese lettering the cherry blossom is mostly associated with Japan, and the Wizards have forged connections with fans there since drafting Rui Hachimura in 2019. "We would not be able to pull that off in any other season." Courtesy Washington Wizards "The white apron was an early favorite," says Chuck Kacsur, the team's senior art director. Other versions featured the same pink paint, but with white markers and even white boundaries on all four sides. They thought about using two different shades for the painted areas - one side pink, the other perhaps blue. On the opposite pole, at least one draft proposal featured blue painted areas with pink lane markers - the inverse of the painted areas in the final version. They toyed with versions in which the paint and some or all of the boundaries were pink. The first step was settling on how much pink to use, and where. "They have some of the best people in the business.") "That is almost flattering," Lochmann says. (And, yes, the Wizards have heard some playful snark about the Miami Heat beating them to pink in alternate courts and uniforms. The entire cherry blossom look is the Wizards' best artistic achievement in decades, and probably by a long shot. After dozens of tweaks and proposals - some wild, some more muted - the Wizards landed here, as first revealed exclusively today at ESPN. "If you looked at next to the court, there was a disconnect," says Hunter Lochmann, the chief marketing officer for Monumental Sports & Entertainment, parent company of the Wizards, the Washington Capitals of the NHL, and the WNBA's Washington Mystics. ![]() The jerseys alone did not have quite the "wow" impact the franchise had anticipated. An extra $150,000 or so for an alternate court the Wizards might use 10 times a season was a tough sell - especially for a franchise that had never used more than one home-court floor in any season until unveiling its throwback bearded-wizard court last month.īut the Wizards' experience with last year's City Edition uniforms - a blue- and red-striped take on their standard jersey - reinforced the need to expand the blossom look into a full-on franchise iconography takeover. Teams were still reeling from the pandemic, when many had slashed budgets and furloughed employees. As the Washington Wizards and Nike were collaborating two-plus years ago on a cherry blossom-themed pink City Edition jersey, the Wizards' brain trust decided to think bigger: What if we had a matching court? What if the court were.
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