KYRIE’S IG feed can be a sometimes enlightening, sometimes bamboozling mix of ancient Egyptian iconography, Black power history, African heritage, and walls of text bannering important activist causes.
Sometimes, he also posts about basketball.
Just like today, when he made this post suggesting a brand-new logo for the NBA. "Gotta happen, I don't care what anyone says," the Brooklyn Nets guard wrote. “Black kings built the league!” Take a look.
The post racked up more than 600,000 likes in a little over an hour.
The art that Irving posted was originally created by graphic artist Tyson Beck, who first posted it on his own IG feed on January 29, 2020, or three days after Kobe Bryant’s untimely death.
“To me it would be a fitting and rightfully deserved tribute to make the change,” Beck wrote at the time. “Jerry West, who is the current logo, has previously stated it’s embarrassing that he is still the logo and wishes it would be changed. Jerry was the person who drafted (traded) Kobe, he was the person who believed in him when others didn’t.”
Beck also added, “Kobe is everything that represents what basketball truly stands for, he is the modern day global ambassador of the game.”
Beck’s artwork became the face of a Change.org petition addressed to the NBA to change the logo. As of writing, more than 3.2 million people have signed it.
Speaking of the old logo, the league has never publicly acknowledged that it is based on West. One likely reason is to avoid any legal and financial entanglements for the use of his image. (Check out this Undefeated article for more.)
Moreover, the league will likely never acknowledge any one player as the official symbol of the NBA.
It is for these reasons that Yahoo! Sports’ Dan Wetzel believes that the NBA will never change its logo to any symbol remotely connected to Kobe — even if, as Wetzel wrote, the “sentiment is wonderful.”
Even more than a year after Bryant's tragic passing, the virality of Kyrie's post shows just how strong that sentiment remains. Just don't hold your breath that anything will come out of it.
“Sources familiar with the league’s thinking said there is no interest in having an individual player as its logo because there are so many who have been instrumental in the growth of the game and the NBA,” Wetzel wrote.
“Generic is better.”
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