As the Washington Wizards and Nike were collaborating two-plus years ago on a cherry blossom-themed pink City Edition jersey, the Wizards' brain trust decided to think bigger: What if we had a matching court? What if the court were ... pink?
Teams were still reeling from the pandemic, when many had slashed budgets and furloughed employees. An extra $150,000 or so for an alternate court the Wizards might use 10 times a season was a tough sell -- especially for a franchise that had never used more than one home-court floor in any season until unveiling its throwback bearded-wizard court last month.
But the Wizards' experience with last year's City Edition uniforms -- a blue- and red-striped take on their standard jersey -- reinforced the need to expand the blossom look into a full-on franchise iconography takeover. They had no matching court last season. The jerseys alone did not have quite the "wow" impact the franchise had anticipated.
"If you looked at [last year's City Edition] next to the court, there was a disconnect," says Hunter Lochmann, the chief marketing officer for Monumental Sports & Entertainment, parent company of the Wizards, the Washington Capitals of the NHL, and the WNBA's Washington Mystics. "You saw it and felt it."
That meant going all-in on a pink court. After dozens of tweaks and proposals -- some wild, some more muted -- the Wizards landed here, as first revealed exclusively today at ESPN.
The entire cherry blossom look is the Wizards' best artistic achievement in decades, and probably by a long shot. (And, yes, the Wizards have heard some playful snark about the Miami Heat beating them to pink in alternate courts and uniforms. "That is almost flattering," Lochmann says. "They have some of the best people in the business.")
The first step was settling on how much pink to use, and where. They toyed with versions in which the paint and some or all of the boundaries were pink. On the opposite pole, at least one draft proposal featured blue painted areas with pink lane markers -- the inverse of the painted areas in the final version. They thought about using two different shades for the painted areas -- one side pink, the other perhaps blue. Other versions featured the same pink paint, but with white markers and even white boundaries on all four sides.
"The white apron was an early favorite," says Chuck Kacsur, the team's senior art director. "We would not be able to pull that off in any other season."
Some of the draft boundaries featured Japanese lettering; the cherry blossom is mostly associated with Japan, and the Wizards have forged connections with fans there since drafting Rui Hachimura in 2019. (The Wizards and Golden State Warriors played two preseason games in Japan this fall.)
They chose the simplest solution: a mostly plain wooden court, matching pink painted areas, and blue trim all around. The shade of blue is new for the Wizards -- brighter and warmer than their usual dark navy, Kacsur says. It is meant to evoke the water in the Washington, D.C., Tidal Basin, the centerpiece of cherry blossom season. They used it in the ball logo at center court, the lowercase "dc" corner icons, and the trim around the pink painted areas.
The same pink appears in the top slice of the ball (which is usually red) and outlining the cherry blossoms along the baselines. In a perfect little flourish, single mini-blossoms dot "i"s in both "Washington" (on the baselines) and "district" (on the near sideline) -- and sit atop the "d" in those "dc" corner logos in which the "d" is rendered as a reaching arm.
The court is unmistakably pink -- you could probably describe it first as "a pink court" -- without being too pink.
"We wanted to make sure it wasn't pink everywhere," Kacsur says. "We needed the right balance. If you use your special ingredient too much, it can overwhelm everything." The Wizards even contemplated white blossom-themed jerseys with pink trim before diving head-long into pick uniforms, officials say.
"The pink is definitely something we took to the players," says Rebecca Winn, the Wizards' senior vice president for marketing. "We did our due diligence there." Kyle Kuzma was a notable supporter, though officials made clear the pink theme predated (by a lot) Kuzma's now famous pregame oversized, pink sweater.
The Wizards simulated what it would look like on television when pink-clad Washington players traversed the pink court -- making sure players would not become over-camouflaged. (This plagued the Houston Rockets during the delightfully gaudy 1990s era of NBA design, when they colored large portions of their court blue -- only to discover teams with blue road jerseys blended into the blue paint. David Stern, then the NBA commissioner, registered his displeasure with the blue-on-blue blurring, league officials have said.)
The blossoms, though, are what make the court sing. They are beautiful yet unintrusive. Rendering them unfilled -- outlined only -- somehow makes them feel light, soft, fluttery. The blossom petals at center court seem to cascade downward into the blue paint, echoing the way the real petals fall into the Tidal Basin, Kacsur says. (That motif is echoed on the gradient-style cherry blossom jerseys, which transition from pink down to blue in the shorts.)
"We kept coming back to the ephemeral nature of the blossoms themselves," Kacsur says. "There is something so special about that. They are here for everyone. They are not behind gates, or in a museum. They are here, and then they are gone."
The team mocked up more aggressive blossom-centric proposals. In some, purple blossoms encircled the center-court logo, with stenciled blossoms -- often much larger than those in the final version -- flowing down the middle. Others featured milky white blossoms and many more flowers along the boundaries. The team even looked at some of the most daring University of Oregon courts, with huge and detailed stains in the wood, for inspiration -- complete with multicolored boundaries:
Some of the proposals had two stains -- one dark, one light -- to differentiate the areas inside and outside the 3-point arc.
They went with the cleanest look across the board, and that seems like the right call. The final version has every element in the right doses. There is enough of the team's standard art that this feels both radical and a natural extension of the team's identity.
"With some teams, [City Edition courts] look like night and day -- almost like alter egos," Kacsur says."It feels like our traditional look transformed into this."