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The Logo: How a Red Silhouette Became Jerry West

FMVP Club

NBA

18 views08/14/2026, 11:46 ET

Why does the NBA logo show a dribbling figure? The answer lies in a 1969 photograph of Jerry West.

If you ask a basketball fan who appears on the NBA logo, most will answer Jerry West. That red-blue-white side-profile dribbler was designed in 1969 by branding consultant Alan Siegel, who was asked to give the young league a clean, recognizable mark.

Siegel looked through a stack of sports photographs and picked one of West mid-dribble. The pose was fluid, balanced, and free of any team marking, which made it perfect for abstraction. He stripped away detail, reduced the figure to a pure outline, and colored it red, white and blue. The result became the NBA's enduring symbol, used on everything from jerseys to courts to broadcast graphics.

Notably, the NBA has never officially confirmed the logo figure is West, and Siegel's firm was bound by a degree of discretion at the time. But Siegel has stated many times in interviews: "That's Jerry." West was always modest about being "the Logo," even a little uneasy. In his autobiography he wrote that he never earned a royalty from it and preferred not to overplay the identity.

There is a quiet symmetry in West's story. As a player, he won the FMVP as a loser; as a retiree, he became the league's face as a nameless silhouette. He never stood at center stage, yet he was everywhere. For a man who valued winning over personal glory, it may be fate's gentlest compensation: the most famous image in basketball is a man who asked for nothing in return.