Hawks Need Help with Jersey Sales

Atlanta Starts NBA Season with New Design, Old Look By A. Scott Walton The Larry O’Brien trophy is one thing every NBA player wants to clutch at least once. In his career But aside from the League MVP honor, there’s just one other top award pro ballers long for. Who winds up as the season’s most popular jersey-seller?

It’s an interesting question to ponder going into the 2012-13 NBA season: especially in Atlanta. If the league-approved souvenir shops at Phillips Arena stock Jeremy Lin’s replica jerseys when the Hawks host the Houston Rockets to open the season, the rookie sensation for last year’s version of the New York Knicks could outsell Josh Smith’s. The crazy thing about the quest for NBA marketing dominance is that it really doesn’t matter where fans live anymore to win the popularity contest. Kobe Bryant surely wasn’t numero uno in sales last year on the backs of L.A.’s already saturated market. And Lin’s jersey sales weren’t second due only on New York-rooted “Lin-santity”. Given last season’s media hysteria over Lin’s big bite out of New York’s attention span, the Hawks leading scorer and rebounder could get lost in the quake of credit cards swiping in favor of an opponent. If anything works in J-Smooth’s jersey sales favor during the feeding frenzy that accompanies every new season, it ‘s that only four of the teams the Hawks face in their first 10 games have higher marketability quotients.

According to one Yahoo business-tracking service – Atlanta ranks slightly on the downside of the league’s 30 teams. The Business Insider reports that Atlanta ranks 16 on the scale of teams deemed “Rising”, “Falling” or “Staying the Same”. The reigning championship Heat franchise sits atop the list, while the Charlotte Bobcats flounder at the very bottom. In all, nine eastern conference teams are ranked as more than the hawks. Though they shed a playmaker (Joe Johnson) and a sharpshooter (Kirk Heinrich) in the offseason, the Hawks still enter training camp appearing stable under the new stewardship of General Manager Danny Ferry. Put on a proverbial fair playing field in the memorabilia shops across the league, the Hawks hatch their season as marketing underdogs against only four teams. And inklings on an image makeover – with a new jersey style that resembles a mash-up looks Atlanta wore in the 1990s – may attract avid collectors. Smith, for his part, has filmed an endorsement for Adidas where he emotes his willingness to carry the Hawks on his wingspan (wearing a version of last’s years stoic white-on-white ensemble). So maybe there’s hope Smith _ motivated by contract year scrutiny _ can aspire to popularity akin by some measure to Lin-sanity after all.