Donald Carter, Norm Sonju and a television western.

Dallas joined the NBA on 1 May 1980. In an archive piece originally published in The Dallas Morning News on 1 May 2005, Brad Townsend described the signing that morning at Union Station, where the league commissioner, Larry O’Brien, put pen to paper with the club’s owner-to-be, Donald Carter. Townsend called Norm Sonju a franchise co-founder and wrote that Sonju had spent months looking for investors after Carter briefly dropped out of the project. English Wikipedia says Carter ran the family business Home Interiors and Gifts, and that Sonju had previously been president and general manager of the Buffalo Braves.

The city had hosted professional basketball before. Wikipedia notes that the Dallas Chaparrals of the American Basketball Association moved to San Antonio in 1973 to become the San Antonio Spurs, leaving Dallas without a team until the expansion club arrived.

The name came from a listener contest. In a 31 May 2011 piece for ESPN’s Page 2, Danny Woodward reported that the local AM station WBAP ran the contest and handed the entries to Sonju and Carter, and that the finalists were Mavericks, Wranglers and Express. Sonju told Woodward that the names all came from the radio contest and that none of the club’s staff had been involved. The owners chose Mavericks in part to honour James Garner, the star of the television western Maverick, who was part of the original ownership group. Woodward wrote that the name was revealed on 1 May 1980 on a blue-and-green flip chart.

The choice had a local wrinkle. Woodward reported that the athletic teams at the University of Texas at Arlington, west of downtown Dallas, had been called the Mavericks since 1971, and that the university kept its name; Sonju told him the club had checked the campus before the announcement and felt confident there would be no confusion.

The original identity leaned into the Western theme. Writing for the SB Nation site Mavs Moneyball on 24 September 2014, Bailey Grey described the original uniforms: white at home and blue on the road, with green accents, a Western-style font and a logo of an “M” wearing a cowboy hat on the left leg of the shorts. The home jersey read “Mavericks” and the road jersey “Dallas.” After one season, he wrote, blue became the accent and green the main colour of the road uniform.

Mark Cuban, a new arena and a horse’s head.

The green and blue held for nearly two decades. Wikipedia says green was the dominant road colour through 1992, and that from the 1992–93 season the club went back to its original blue road scheme with a slightly altered “Dallas” script, a design it used until 2001. Mavs Moneyball describes the same shift as a renewed emphasis on blue from 1993.

Ownership changed twice in that period. The Dallas Morning News reported in its 2005 retrospective that Carter sold controlling interest in 1996 while keeping a minor stake, and that Mark Cuban bought controlling interest from Ross Perot Jr. in January 2000, together with a stake in the American Airlines Center. Wikipedia says Perot and the car dealer David McDavid had bought their interest from Carter on 1 May 1996.

Cuban’s arrival led to a full rebrand. On 11 May 2010 an ESPN Dallas blog post looking back at the 2001–02 season said the Mavericks said goodbye to the cowboy-hat logo that had served the franchise since 1980 and moved to a sharper, more modern uniform and a sleek horse-head logo, as the team left Reunion Arena for the new American Airlines Center. Mavs Moneyball describes the new mark as a horse’s head melding into a basketball, with a navy, royal blue and silver scheme replacing the green and blue and a pair of alternate “M” logos added. Wikipedia calls the colours midnight blue, royal blue and silver, and describes the scheme as inspired by the Dallas Cowboys.

The lettering changed as well. Both the white home and the navy road jersey carried a “Dallas” script across the chest. Wikipedia says the home jersey set “Dallas” in midnight blue with royal blue numbers trimmed in silver, while the road jersey set it in white with silver numbers. Mavs Moneyball suggests the city name was used on both because “Mavericks” proved too long in the new uniform font. In August 2010, according to Wikipedia, a royal blue road uniform with a navy “Dallas” script replaced the midnight blue one.

Design and documentation.

A basketball identity is built for a small, bright stage. The jersey carries much of the load: a wordmark across the chest, a number front and back, and trim at the neck and armholes, all of which have to read on a moving body under arena lights and on a television screen at the same time. Designers tend to favour bold, condensed letterforms, a short list of flat colours and outlines clean enough to survive tackle twill, sublimation and screen printing. Numerals are often drawn as a dedicated set so that similar digits stay distinct at a distance.

The court is the other canvas. A centre-circle logo, baseline wordmarks and painted keys turn the floor into a wide graphic seen from directly above, and the colours chosen there have to work with wood grain, glare and broadcast cameras. Alternate uniforms add a further layer: city-themed editions, throwback sets and statement colours let a club test new lettering or reference local history without changing its primary marks. Arena naming then adds a sponsor’s name to the building, so signage systems have to balance the club’s palette with a partner’s logo on scoreboards, concourses and entrances.

Silver, green, a skyline and a Pegasus.

The alternate uniforms have been the place for experiments. Wikipedia says the club introduced a shiny silver alternate in the 2003–04 season, which fans nicknamed the “Trash Bags” and which was dropped after one game. A green alternate for 2004–05, recalling the 1980s road uniforms with “Mavs” across the front, was designed by the rapper Sean Combs, according to both Wikipedia and Mavs Moneyball. A royal blue “Mavs” alternate followed in 2009, also worn with a “Los Mavs” wordmark for the league’s Noche Latina nights.

Fans were later invited to design one. Mavs Moneyball reported in September 2014 that a design-a-uniform contest hosted by Cuban on his blog had produced a navy alternate with a version of the Dallas skyline on the chest, to be worn from the 2015–16 season. Wikipedia says the skyline design was dropped before 2019–20 in favour of a navy uniform with “Mavericks” across the front.

Since Nike became the NBA’s supplier in 2017, the City uniforms have added more references. Wikipedia lists a black set with “DAL” and neon green trim in 2017–18, a graffiti-style “MAVS” in 2019–20, a white set inspired by Pegasus, a Dallas symbol, in 2020–21, a 2021–22 set that reworked the cowboy-hat logo with a “D” in place of the “M,” a disco-era design for 2022–23 and a 2023–24 design made with the musician Leon Bridges, with Western lettering in silver and blue. The green 1980s road uniform has returned several times as a Classic set.

Ownership changed again at the end of 2023. FOX5 Las Vegas reported on 27 December 2023 that the NBA Board of Governors had approved the sale of controlling interest in the Mavericks from Cuban to the families of Miriam Adelson and Sivan and Patrick Dumont, with Patrick Dumont, president and chief operating officer of Las Vegas Sands, to serve as the team’s governor. The station reported that Cuban would keep control of basketball operations under the deal.

For a design guide, the Dallas Mavericks show how a club can keep a 2001 primary mark steady for decades while using alternate and City uniforms to revisit its green past and its Western roots. Compare it with the San Antonio Spurs, the former Dallas Chaparrals, and the NBA, the league that admitted Dallas in 1980. For this guide we use midnight navy, royal blue and silver with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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