NBA award winners to wear special jersey patches for season debut

The uniforms of award winners from the 2024-25 NBA season will look a little different for opening week.

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Players such as Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (MVP), Evan Mobley (Defensive Player of the Year) and Stephon Castle (Rookie of the Year) will have their respective trophy icons sewn above the Nike swoosh on the front of their uniforms.

Members of the All-NBA, All-Rookie and All-Defensive teams will also don a specific patch. However, individual awards have precedence over that one. For example, Gilgeous-Alexander will only wear an MVP patch, although he was named to the All-NBA first team.

The patch will be worn only for their season debut, with 35 different players set to wear one. The uniform will then be auctioned off by Sotheby’s, the official game-worn source of the NBA, during the season. Each player will receive a uniform to keep.

Cleveland Cavaliers head coach Kenny Atkinson (Coach of the Year) and Oklahoma City Thunder executive vice president and general manager Sam Presti (Executive of the Year) will wear lapels to acknowledge their accomplishments.

According to Christopher Arena, head of on-court and brand partnerships of the NBA, the league recognized how some players who win individual awards don’t get their moment of recognition. The Rookie of the Year may be on vacation when the award is announced, Arena referenced. The MVP or Defensive Player of the Year likely gets to hoist the trophy in front of his home crowd during the playoffs.

With the NBA looking to highlight its trophy icons announced in December 2022, the patch idea came to life.

“We wanted to shine a little bit of a light on what those trophies are, what they look like and give those players a little moment. Now, do I think at the first game of the year they’re all gonna get out there and get a standing ovation? Maybe not,” Arena told ESPN. “But they’re gonna walk in that day, they’re gonna see that trophy patch on their jersey and they’re gonna remember that that’s what they did and maybe it’s motivation for that one night.”

It’s a first-of-its-kind program separate from that of Fanatics/Topps, which organized debut patches for every NBA rookie’s first game and gold logos on the back of the MVP, Defensive Player of the Year and Rookie of the Year award winner uniforms for the entire season. However, the league drew inspiration from it.

The NBA is no stranger to patches — they’ve been featured on uniforms for special occasions like the NBA Finals or Christmas Day games. But this is the furthest the league has gone for player recognition.

Each individual award trophy is named after a former player and features specific iconography on the patch. The Michael Jordan Trophy for the league’s most valuable player has a player leaping in the air. The base also has five sides in a nod to Jordan’s league MVPs.

The patch on Gilgeous-Alexander’s uniform is similarly designed with five sides. Mobley’s uniform patch is a player in a defensive stance, sharing similarities with the Hakeem Olajuwon Trophy he received.

It will be the same for Jalen Brunson (Clutch Player of the Year), Stephen Curry (Twyman-Stokes Teammate of the Year), Payton Pritchard (Sixth Man of the Year), Dyson Daniels (Most Improved Player of the Year) and Jrue Holiday (Sportsmanship Award). Their patches also have elements specific to their award trophy.

The league will track how the players and fans respond with hopes of the patches being a long-term inclusion.

“We want this to be a tradition, so when a player does win an award and he does have the opportunity to hold the trophy up or not, he knows that next season, I’m getting a patch,” Arena said.

He also emphasized the inclusion of All-NBA team members in the program. With there being 15 All-NBA members as opposed to 24 NBA All-Stars, Arena called the 15-member group “elite.” He added that one of the first things mentioned when looking back at a player’s career is their All-NBA team appearances.

No different than other awards, players aren’t able to bask in recognition for this specific accomplishment.

“Just by the way it works out and how we issue awards, it’s sort of the last thing we issue and we talk about. And so it doesn’t get the flowers like we were talking about …,” he said. “These 15 guys accordingly were the best in the league that year and we thought that was worthy of a patch.”

The idea came together over the summer with weeks of deliberation. The league looked at various options for locations, though NBA uniforms have a concrete placement for specific patches.

The league had discussions about featuring the patch on the back of the jersey above a player’s last name, which holds the Larry O’Brien Trophy icon, indicating how many championships a franchise has won. However, with the trophy in the center, adding the patch made it off-center with decision-makers struggling to identify if they should move it left or right. A shoulder stripe was also an option. However, it’s typically reserved for commemoration.

Eventually, they landed on the right side of the uniform above the Nike swoosh.

“We love our trophies. We love the tradition we’ve built. We love the consistency. The icons that we want them to become,” Arena said. “And so we’re hoping by giving them some front-facing exposure here, that people will start to connect the dots and they’ll be as revered as any other trophy in sports.”