A pair of recognizable and sorely missed logos will apparently make their way back to the court for the 2026 NBA Finals, when the NBA will resume painting the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy and the NBA Finals script on the home team’s court, according to ESPN’s Shams Charania. The trophy logo hasn’t appeared on the court since the 2009 NBA Finals between the Los Angeles Lakers and Orlando Magic, and the Finals script logo has been off court since the 2014 NBA Finals between the Miami Heat and San Antonio Spurs.
During the 2025 NBA Finals, NBA commissioner Adam Silver explained that a safety issue was a main reason the league wouldn’t place logos on the court for its championship series.
“One of the reasons we moved away from the logos on the courts is – whether it was perception or reality – there was a sense that maybe the logos added some slipperiness to the court, and it was a change sort of on the court that was coming just at the time of the Finals,” Silver said last June, per USA Today. “And, again, maybe it’s for superstitious reasons or just a sense from teams that we shouldn’t be changing things around such important competition. That’s largely why we stopped putting the logos on the court. But when I saw that suggestion on social media, maybe there’s a way around it. I hadn’t thought all that much about it until I saw it.”
At the time, Silver admitted that the NBA did plan to revisit the concept of having logos painted on the court at a later date. The NBA did project digital images of the Larry O’Brien Trophy onto the court during last June’s NBA Finals between the Oklahoma City Thunder and Indiana Pacers.