The thing about saving the fans money is absurd. Once the players seeing the owners making money, the players will want in on it. And that means even larger payrolls than now. How about $200MM over 6 years for a contract?

Not to mention the fact that the broadcast networks would simply leverage the opportunity to superimpose their own advertising right over top the KPMG logo placed on the jersey. This would water down the amount Teams would get and only boost the amount the broadcasters pocket.

Maybe you just need to bow down to the Advertising Broadcast Giants as king and simply sell them a service they can use. For a fee, your NBA team will wear a ‘green-screen’ patch or something. Now the broadcasters can filter the broadcast feed through a market-specific real time filter and simply replace the ‘green-screen’ with the logo of their choice. How much would the broadcasters pay for the headband crew to wear ‘green-screen’ headbands or you a t-shirt they can put anything on? The technology exists, it’s just a matter of knowing the best way of leveraging and promoting it. This way you continue to control when the ‘patch’ is on the court, who is wearing the ‘patch’, the size and location of the ‘patch’ and the base-price of the ‘patch’ and what that means. It would obviously be worth more during playoffs or for teams/players that draw an audience. Let the experts decide what product it should be…just provide the service.
http://www.digitalbroadcasting.com/Content/ProductShowcase/product.asp?DocID={D729D497-BF95-11D4-8C7F-009027DE0829} is one example of the available technology to merge graphics onto a realtime video broadcast.

Let each *player* auction off the standard-sized logo space on their jersey.

Week by week.

So-and-so gets hot, joins the starting line up. Bam, the demand (price) for his jersey “real estate” goes up because the supply (air time) goes up. nba.ebay.com

Fixed pricing is usually vastly less efficient than variable pricing in a free market system. (Ask WalMart if they sell clocks for the same price in every zip code. Nope. Not since the early 80′s when they discovered what computers are really for).

Or maybe…
Players work for zero dollar salary (okay, maybe a league minimum amount – is there such a thing in basketball?). But also get paid for performance, as measured directly by ad revenue.

Naw… they’d never go for that.

I realize the idea is not to change the team name itself, but if a new nickname arrives because of the sponsor selected, there might be little the team could do to prevent its use.

Just off the top of my head, I’m thinking if McDonalds were the jersey sponsor, “McMavs” might be too tempting for many to resist.

Then what?

I thought of this probably because of an experience here in Phoenix. Bank One (te bank) became the paid name sponsor of the new arena a few years ago. The name “Bank One Ballpark” turned into “BOB” about 20 minutes after it opened.

As you can imagine the mention of BOB a few thousand times a week doesn’t quite mean as much to the sponsor as “Bank One Ballpark.”
Doesn’t reduce the value to zero, of course.

The sponsor has to be selected very carefully.
Just a thought.

However, here that’s not the case. So the mavs get 10 million a year for the uniform ad. They can’t go pick up another superstar. The cap prevents it. All that money goes into the owners pocket. I love ya Mark but please don’t use the “it will keep ticket prices down” argument.

Bleh indeed.

Financially, I’m not so sure it actually makes sense. Will viewers eventually get fed up with how many advertisements they must see just to watch basketball, and when watching basketball becomes watching advertisements, then what?

I vote no advertisements.