On Wednesday, the Nets announced a new partnership with software company Infor. According to their press release, this basically means the team will get help in gathering data to improve “team performance,” as well as digital marketing. This all sounds neat and promising, and very similar to what the Celtics are getting with their partnership with GE.
Brooklyn Nets reveal new jerseys with sponsorship patch, and some fans are not happy
This also means the Nets are getting a logo on their jersey next season, making them the fourth NBA team to get branded uniforms.
Not only are the Nets and Celtics similar in getting a sponsorship from a tech company, they’re also similar in that the fans think the newly branded jerseys look ugly. We’ve seen what Celtics fans said about the ‘GE’ jerseys — here’s what Nets fans have to say:
That’s only a small fraction of the responses the Nets got from their announcement on Twitter. Corporate logos on NBA jerseys were expected for a good while now, and the concept is nothing new, but fans have not responded well to these updates since the NBA put Kia logos on the 2016 All-Star uniforms. This is just a small sample of how they felt at the time:
The silver lining is that the “pilot program” for branded jerseys will occur for three years, starting in the 2017-18 season, which is short enough to promise that it ends completely. The downside is that it’s also long enough for people to be complacent that the sponsorship jerseys become permanent.
The future on whether this experiment grows into permanence is still up in the air, but for now, we know the fans haven’t responded well. Also, they’re kind of right: That Infor logo on a Nets jersey sticks out like a sore thumb. At the very least, change the logo’s red-white color scheme to a black-white or gray-white one. GE did that for the Celtics, and that made things a little more palatable.
