SK Ep.2: NBA Iconic Moments T-Shirt Idea

     I’m a fan of many sports. Football (Soccer) and basketball. Naturally, I watch a lot of youtube contents related to the aforementioned sports. Tifo Football is one of my favorite youtube channels about football. I even purchased their book “How To Watch Football: 52 Rules for Understanding the Beautiful Game, On and Off the Pitch” and had a blast with it. I really recommend the book to those who would like to learn more about the game, both for those who are new and have been in the footballing scene for a while.


IDEA
     Anyways, the whole point of the previous paragraph was to mention that a particular merch that Tifo Football released some time ago caught my eye. It was a tshirt with a football pitch image and little circles placed to indicate the location and the movement of the players. It was a representation of some of the most iconic goals in football history, with the likes of goals from Messi against Getafe where he dribbled past all the defenders and scored a magnificent goal.

     And that gave me the idea to try to replicate that for iconic basketball shots. The first moment that popped into my head was the game where Stephen Curry hit the game winner against OKC with a classic Michael Breen double BANG!


The MOMENT
     Anybody who watches a little bit of basketball knows that shot. At OKC, overtime with less than 10 seconds to go. Iguodala gets the rebound from Russell Westbrook's miss, advances the ball up the court with a pass to Curry on the left. He dribbles up the court and as soon as he crosses the halfcourt, he launches the ball catching Andre Roberson in front of him off guard.

     “They do have a time-out, decide not to use i-, Curry! From way downtown! BANG! BANG!” and Mike Breen stamps his seal of approval as a moment in NBA history with his signature bang.


The IMPLEMENTATION
     I had numerous iterations of how to capture this moment as just one image. It sucks that I lost all of the previous attempts at this (it's in the laptop from my previous workplace). For now, I took inspiration from Tifo Football, with the dotted lines representing movement of the player and the solid line representing the shot. I believe that the Tifo Football T-shirt could not fill the whole T-shirt with 22 players because that is just too many. Thankfully, basketball is played with 10 players and I was able to fill the imagery with all 10 players as below.

     Instead of the names of the individual players, I have assigned the markers to their numbers accordingly. For the people who watch the NBA and know this instance, I think that the numbers are enough to recognize the players. The color choices of the markers are also corresponding to the jersey that the players were wearing at the moment. Golden State Warriors were wearing their alternate black sleeved jerseys, dark grey background with white font and yellow trims. I don't think anybody likes sleeved jerseys. Whereas OKC was wearing their classic colorway of white background with blue fonts and orange trim (I can’t seem to find what the class jersey is called).

     It’s kind of weird with Harrison Barnes (No. 40) and Andre Iguodala (No.9) not inside of the half-court but in the end, I feel that this gives a little bit of an outside-of-the-box visual and a little more personality. Whilst working on the Curry shot, I was in the zone and thought of another moment that would be suitable for this type of illustration. 


Lillard against OKC in the Play-Offs
    Come to think of it, both instances were against the Thunder (yikes). Anyways, whilst working on this illustration, it was much easier to draw up as this specific play was played by just Paul George (No.13) and Damian Lillard (No.0 Red) while the other players were just standing aloof. Nevertheless, this moment was even more of a dagger to the opposition, with the Trailblazers eliminating OKC from the Play-Offs. Poor Russ (No. 0 Blue), the only repeating player on the OKC roster. Sucks to suck. For those unfamiliar, OKC is in the dark blue jerseys with orange font and blue trims while the Portland Trail Blazers are in the white jerseys with black font and red trims.

 
Future Development
     I guess the next step in this project is to actually print these images onto T-shirts to see how it looks in real life. I actually have experience creating a custom T-shirt with an NBA theme. It is has Ben Simmons’ eyes covered by a row of text that says “F#&K THREES” aftering dunking on some poor soul. This was when Ben Simmons was still a highly touted prospect and the general consensus seemed to be that the 76ers should build around Simmons instead of Embiid due to the injury concerns. How times have changed in such a short time.

[Photo of my Ben Simmons T-shirt]

     As of now, the website that I used to create the T-shirt above is not working but I will get to creating the T-shirt when/if the website gets back online. The next follow up to this post should be when I actually make the T-shirts so, let’s hope that the website gets back online sooner rather than later.