How Jerry West became the NBA’s logo

In 1969, NBA Commissioner J. Walter Kennedy hired Siegel’s branding agency to design a new logo for the league. Kennedy was impressed with the work Siegel had done in overseeing Jerry Dior’s design of Major League Baseball’s 100-year anniversary logo, which featured a red, white and blue silhouette of a batter.

“[Kennedy] wanted a logo that had a family relationship to Major League Baseball, because the NBA’s reputation had been tarnished by many players who had taken drugs, and basketball had slipped behind the reputation of baseball,” Siegel said in 2011.

Siegel was searching for inspiration for his NBA logo when he called up his childhood friend and fellow Cornell graduate Dick Schaap. The legendary sportswriter and broadcaster was working as an editor at Sport magazine at the time and gave Siegel access to the publication’s photo archives.

Siegel, who played high school basketball with Hall of Fame coach Larry Brown, was immediately drawn to a photo of West by Wen Roberts, who became the Lakers’ official photographer when the franchise relocated from Minneapolis to Los Angeles before the 1960-61 season.

“It had a nice flavor to it, so I took that picture and we traced it,” Siegel said of the photograph, which depicted West dribbling the ball with his left hand. “It was perfect. It was vertical and it had a sense of movement. It was one of those things that just clicked.”

Siegel, who considered West one of his favorite players and said he once played against him in a high school All-Star Game, designed the logo with his partner, Bob Gale, “in maybe an hour” and presented it to the NBA the next day. It was approved.

“I charged $14,000,” Siegel told NBA.com in 2021. “It was not a lot of money, but it was a prestigious assignment and I never gave it a second thought.”

The league’s new logo was introduced the same year West was named MVP of the NBA Finals and presented a Dodge Charger R/T by Sport magazine, despite the fact that his Lakers lost in seven games to the Boston Celtics. Siegel said no one asked whether West was the inspiration for the design at the time.

“That looks like somebody familiar,” West told the Times of his reaction when he first saw the logo.

West, a 14-time all-star who won nine NBA titles as a player and executive, later admitted he was uncomfortable being “The Logo.”

“I wish that it had never gotten out that I’m the logo,” West said on ESPN’s “The Jump” in 2017. “I really do. I’ve said it more than once, and it’s flattering if that’s me — and I know it is me — but it is flattering. But to me, I played in a time when they first started to try to market the league. There were five people that they were going to consider, and I didn’t find out about it until the late commissioner [Kennedy] told me about it. … Again, it’s flattering. But if I were the NBA, I would be embarrassed about it. I really would.”

The league has never declared West as the inspiration for the logo, though Commissioner Adam Silver acknowledged “it sure looks a lot like him” in 2021.

During an episode of his podcast last year, Los Angeles Clippers forward Paul George told West that he must consider his connection to the logo a great honor.

“I don’t look at it that way,” West said. “ … I have often thought, ‘What would I like for people to think about me?’ He was a good guy and he cared. That would be it. Nothing more, nothing less.”