A Canadian expansion name that stayed when the team moved south.

The Memphis Grizzlies began life in Canada. English Wikipedia says the club was established in 1995 as the Vancouver Grizzlies, one of two expansion teams, alongside the Toronto Raptors, that took the NBA into Canada for the 1995–96 season. Early proposals were for a team called the Vancouver Mounties, but, according to Wikipedia, objections from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police sent the club looking for another name. It settled on Grizzlies, after the grizzly bear native to British Columbia. For all six of its Vancouver seasons the team played at General Motors Place, and its costumed bear mascot, Grizz, was introduced in that first year.

The Canadian chapter was short. Wikipedia says the Vancouver Grizzlies applied to the NBA to relocate to Memphis, Tennessee on 26 March 2001, and that the league granted the move on 3 July 2001. The businessman Michael Heisley was the owner at the time. Writing for Sports Illustrated on 25 October 2012, Ben Golliver noted that Heisley had bought the franchise in 2000 and that his ownership had seen the move from Vancouver to Memphis in 2001 and the opening of the FedExForum in 2004.

A new city raised the question of a new name. Wikipedia says that after the move the team explored changing “Grizzlies” to something that reflected the Memphis area better, but local people backed the existing name, in part because Memphis had already had a team called the Memphis Grizzlies: a World Football League club that played in 1974 and 1975. The city had also been home to the Memphis Sounds of the American Basketball Association from 1970 to 1975, a team the club would later honour on a uniform. For its first three Memphis seasons the team played at the Pyramid Arena, before moving into FedExForum in 2004.

The first Memphis uniforms were a direct carry-over. According to Wikipedia, the Grizzlies kept the uniforms they had worn in their final Vancouver season, now with the city name across both the white and the black jersey, and with turquoise and red as accent colours. After one season the club swapped the “G-bear” logo on the right leg for a “howling bear” and added a “ball and claws” logo above the player’s name.

A new arena, a new blue and a calmer bear.

The move into FedExForum in 2004 came with a new identity. Wikipedia says the Grizzlies released new uniforms that year in navy blue, Beale Street blue, smoke blue and gold. The team name returned to the home jersey, and the letters and numbers used a split-letter style, which Wikipedia compares with 1990s uniforms of the Toronto Blue Jays and the Cleveland Cavaliers. The primary logo changed too: the howling bear gave way to a more stoic bear head, with no basketball in the mark.

The new colours reached the stands as well as the court. Wikipedia says the club’s Growl Towels, the rally towels handed to fans at home playoff games, were white when they first appeared in 2004 and turned gold when the team changed its colours for the 2004–05 season.

The Beale Street blue took a larger role in 2009, when, according to Wikipedia, the Grizzlies added an alternate uniform with that blue as the base colour. On the alternate, the city name and the player’s name ran in a straight line, while the primary jerseys used a radially arched layout. In 2010 the team moved to Adidas’ Revolution 30 uniform system, and Wikipedia says the numbers changed from the split-letter style to a bolder, single-colour design. In 2017 the Grizzlies wore a black sleeved uniform as a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr.

Ownership changed hands in 2012. Wikipedia says Heisley reached an agreement in principle in June that year to sell the club to the technology entrepreneur Robert Pera, and that in August Pera agreed terms with a group of local partners including J. R. “Pitt” Hyde, Staley Cates, Ed Dobbs, Duncan Williams and Billy Orgel. Chris Herrington of the Memphis Flyer reported on 25 October 2012 that the NBA’s Board of Governors had approved the sale of the Grizzlies from Heisley to the group led by Pera, with completion still to follow; Golliver reported the same approval in Sports Illustrated that day. Pera has been the controlling owner since then, and Wikipedia says he named Jason Levien chief executive in November 2012.

Design and documentation.

Team names travel more easily than teams do. When a club changes city, the name sometimes goes with it, sometimes stays behind for a later team to claim, and sometimes returns years afterwards with its old colours and records attached. Each path leaves a design problem: a nickname chosen for one place has to make sense in another, and a revived name has to look familiar without looking dated.

Uniforms are a second thread. Clubs have occasionally hired fashion designers rather than sports outfitters to set a palette and a jersey, and those choices can outlast the people who made them, coming back as throwback or anniversary editions once the original fans have grown up.

Colour revivals follow a recognisable pattern. A team retires a shade, fans keep buying the old merchandise, and the shade returns first on an alternate jersey, then on the court, then on the primary mark. Arena graphics then carry the identity at full scale: floor paint, baseline lettering, banners, scoreboards and concourse signage all have to work with the same few colours under bright light and on television. For a designer, the useful lesson is how a small set of marks and tones is stretched across a building as well as a shirt.

Refresh: steel gray, an M in the claws and a court turned sideways.

The current look was presented on 2 August 2018. An Associated Press report published by NBA.com that day said the Grizzlies had unveiled new logos, colour treatments, uniforms and a new court at a Thursday evening event at FedExForum for the media and invited fans, where a courier delivered packages holding the new jerseys. The club also added FedEx to the jersey as its sponsor.

The AP described the details. The uniforms were mainly darker blue and white, with a Beale Street Blue “statement” uniform kept in the set and the grizzly head logo on the side of the darker shorts. Every uniform carried a blue collar, which the team linked to its “grit-and-grind” approach. The main bear-head logo gained a “steel gray” outline meant to sharpen the look of the bear’s eyes, and the claw ball emblem was rotated so that the three middle claws around the ball form an M for Memphis. The court planks were laid side to side rather than along the floor, and the AP quoted Jason Wexler, the club’s president of business operations, tying that choice to a city that “cuts against the grain.”

Wikipedia adds the uniform detail. The white “Association” and navy “Icon” jerseys set the player’s name below the number and the city and team names in a straight line, with three alternating lines on the waistband that spell “MEM” and asymmetrical striping. The Beale Street blue “Statement” jersey kept the radial arch, and a 2022 version spelled out the full team name, with “Memphis” in gold and “Grizzlies” in split navy and smoke lettering.

Nike’s City uniforms have turned to the city’s history. Wikipedia lists a first set with lettering based on the “I Am a Man” placards of the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike, a grey 2018–19 set honouring Memphis professional wrestling, Vancouver throwbacks in 2019–20, a black and metallic gold 2020–21 set for Isaac Hayes and Stax Records, a 2022–23 tribute to Memphis rap and a red 2024–25 set marking fifty years since the rebranding of the Memphis Sounds.

For a design guide, the Memphis Grizzlies show how a name chosen for one city can be reworked in another through colour, street names and local history. Compare the Vancouver Canucks, the Sacramento Kings and the Portland Trail Blazers. For this guide we use navy, Beale Street blue and gold with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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