Just over six years after NBA players began wearing sponsored patches on their jerseys, NBA referees will do the same for the first time.
NBA officials will begin wearing jerseys with Emirates Airlines patches directly below the NBA logo on the left chest at the All-Star Game on Feb. 18, the league announced Thursday. Officials will continue to wear Emirates patches when the NBA season resumes a few days later.
Meanwhile, G League referees will begin wearing the patches to begin the 2024-25 campaign, and WNBA officials will begin in the league's 2025 season.
The referee patches were just one part of the rollout of support for Dubai, United Arab Emirates-based Emirates, which in a multi-year deal officially becomes the NBA's global airline partner. Emirates will also sponsor the NBA's seasonal tournament, which will be renamed the Emirates NBA Cup.
While NBA players began wearing sponsored patches during the 2017-18 campaign, a move that generated millions of dollars annually for each club, other sports such as soccer have long used players' jerseys as advertising real estate. high priced. The move comes at a time when NBA viewership is up from last year on major networks and at a time when the league's referees appear on television much more than in the past.
Television cameras typically focus on the head referees as they finalize their calls through a microphone in the arena following coach challenges, where referees review replays of disputed calls, a process that often takes minutes at a time. The number of reviews has increased in recent years, with league stakeholders voting in 2023 to allow clubs a third challenge if a coach requests one and is successful on his first two attempts.
During the 2019-20 regular season, when the league first implemented coach challenges, referees deliberated on a total of 633 challenges, or 0.59 per regular season game. Through Monday's games, or about 60% of the way through the 2023-24 regular season, officials had already reviewed 765 coaches' challenges, or 1.03 challenges per game.
