Sure, the league could work with broadcast partners so that scoreboards would alert viewers that the game was part of the tournament. That was easy. But those words and markings are small and might fade from the viewer’s consciousness fast.
Around April, they started thinking about the basketball court itself. Officials proposed special decals on the floor and boundaries,
similar to the ones it uses for the NBA Finals and All-Star Game — only these might read “Group A” or “Group B,” perhaps alongside a rendering of the trophy the tournament
winners would eventually get. Others suggested the teams might warm up in new shooting shirts used only for tournament games.
Around mid-July, they took those ideas to senior leadership, including commissioner Adam Silver. The feedback — with Silver
perhaps the loudest voice — was clear, said Christopher Arena, the NBA’s head of on-court and brand partnerships: “More, more, more — bigger and bolder.”
Soon after, a combination of Silver, other senior leaders and the league’s creative services group started kicking around a bigger idea: What if we painted the entire court? And what if we did it for all 30 teams, using the same general template?
“The biggest decision was to paint the entire court with no wood showing,” Arena told ESPN. “That was the ‘Wow.'”
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By late July, they had settled on that template: The bulk of the court in one color linked to each team’s City Edition uniform, with one central strip the width of the in-the-key painted
area running from baseline to baseline in another shade — meant to evoke an airport runway, and the idea that each group play
game had the teams on their own runway to the tournament’s final four in Las Vegas.
A giant in-season tournament trophy would serve as the center-court logo, superimposed on each team’s individual logo. A tipped-over version of the trophy would be squeezed inside the foul line on both ends of each court.
