The National Basketball Players Association will seriously mull making a change that would secure the late Kobe Bryant's imprint on the NBA. Among the options is to change the NBA logo from a silhouette of Hall of Famer Jerry West to a more updated one of Bryant.
Players, coaches, and executives who were touched by Bryant's life have been mourning his loss since Sunday, when his private helicopter crashed into the hillsides of Calabasas, taking his and his daughter's lives, along with seven other passengers.
Bismack Biyombo, the vice president of the NBPA, noted key people in the NBPA will hop on a conference call soon to mull options and ideas, with the logo change being among them:
“We are hoping,” said Biyombo regarding the potential changes, according to Roderick Boone of The Athletic. “The NBA is going to do something. As a player, I think you want to see that. You just want to see that because of what the guy has meant to the game, to be honest. For me, I think as a player, I would really like to embrace that because you’ve seen the change, and you’ve seen it over the course of the years. Kobe, he wants to teach. As we see now, he opened the academy, and everybody was going to his academy, and the guy was present there early in the morning early to teach. There’s not many people who are doing that.
“(Making him the logo), it’s an appreciation of what the guy has done for the game of basketball, and that’s what I think we all should be thinking about.”
One of Biyombo’s teammates, Miles Bridges, agreed with the sentiment, as the second-year player can see changing the silhouette to fit Kobe Bryant’s likeness.
The NBA has proved to be a much more progressive league than any of its counterparts in the other three major Americans sports.
Other players like Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan were close with Bryant and are also on board with making the logo change:
“Kyle got to know Kobe, learn from Kobe,” said Biyombo. “There’s a lot of guys I know that leaned on Kobe their whole careers. I played with DeMar, and DeMar is a good friend of mine. DeMar, his whole career is Kobe. This guy wears nothing but Kobe, plays in Kobe shoes. All the brand-new pairs of Kobe’s, nobody wears them before DeMar. DeMar has to wear them first. So he meant something in this guy’s career, and the guy had a commitment to follow the things that Kobe has done, his work ethic.”
Kobe Bryant shaped the ways of the modern NBA the way that West once did for other generations. Now that the NBA has passed the torch from the late David Stern to Adam Silver, there's a window to break away from tradition and innovate, all while paying respect to one of the game's greats by etching him as the new face of the NBA brand.
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