Marks wanted change, to put his artistic imprint on the franchise he has helped reinvent, and he had a radical idea: a gray floor meant to evoke blacktop courts, the streets of Brooklyn, and the borough’s “industrial vibe,” he says. Gray has been on the fringes of the team’s Brooklyn-era palette, including on the alternate Brooklyn Dodgers-themed uniforms they wore in past seasons.
Everything Marks and the Nets’ creative team toyed with from there centered around gray. It was a risk -- an unknown. The NBA says it has never had an all-gray court, though a few teams -- the
New Orleans Pelicans,
Denver Nuggets,
Cleveland Cavaliers,
Milwaukee Bucks, and others -- have shaded enlarged logos and landscapes into sections of their floors. Years ago, one team proposed a black floor designed to recall darker asphalt courts. The league rejected it, arguing it would not play well on television.
Going with a two-tone gray design meant demoting the team’s signature black to the boundaries. Marks thought they would still retain enough black, especially since the theater-style lighting in
the Barclays Center shrouds the seats around the court. “Barclays is dark anyway,” Marks says. “I wanted this to be brighter without using super bright colors. This is simple, to the point.”
It also allowed the Nets to transition from white lines to black, and black-on-gray is a pleasing visual.
The court will be a little splashier on nights when Brooklyn wears The Notorious B.I.G.-inspired city edition jerseys with multicolored trim meant to mimic the legendary rapper’s Coogi sweaters. (Those jerseys will be white this season, the team says. They were black last season.) That trim, which the teams calls “Brooklyn Camo,” will ring some of the boundaries. The team may plop their Biggie-inspired tilted-crown alternate logo onto the city edition court that will accompany the jerseys this season, though that has not been finalized, team officials say. That court will be identical to the main one -- gray-on-gray -- in every other way, the team says.