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Welcome to this week’s edition of The Baseline!

Every Wednesday at 9:36 AM EST, I break down the blueprint for basketball culture, covering industry insights, marketing strategies, and creator tools and resources.

Let’s get started…

MARKETING BLUEPRINT

Every NBA Playoffs, the same debate takes over NBA Twitter and it has nothing to do with who's winning.

Are you wearing the t-shirt or not?

If you don’t know, some NBA teams will activate in-arena t-shirt takeovers to amplify home court advantage and unify their fanbase.

Teams take over their arenas with coordinated t-shirt giveaways as they turn all of their fans into one unified wall of noise against the visiting team.

Visually, there are few better atmospheres in all of sports.

But from a marketing perspective…what’s the actual ROI of this execution?

Let’s breakdown the numbers:

The average NBA arena holds around 19,000 fans.

The average wholesale blank t-shirt costs ~$3, with standard heat press graphics costing ~$2 per unit.

This brings the total production cost to roughly $5 per shirt, or approximately $95,000 per game (not even accounting for tax and shipping yet).

Assuming design and placement on the seats are handled internally, those costs stay fixed.

Sometimes, a corporate sponsor offsets this by placing their logo on the shirt or an apparel partner covers the blanks entirely.

But if there’s no partnership, the team is spending nearly $100K out of pocket for a single night.

And some teams like the Oklahoma City Thunder are doing this nearly every playoff game as it’s turned into a staple of their team’s fan experience.

Other teams like the New York Knicks extended their Game 1 t-shirt takeover into the entire city with a guerrilla out-of-home activation, turning their t-shirts into a full cultural moment.

But a team like the Portland Trail Blazers has already announced they won’t be distributing T-shirts during their Game 3 and Game 4 home games.

So what’s the return for one of these takeovers?

From a performance marketing perspective, a t-shirt takeover is almost impossible to measure. There's no direct click, no conversion, no trackable attribution. It doesn't directly sell more tickets, increase merch sales, or grow your social following overnight.

From a brand marketing perspective, it's one of the most powerful tools in sports. It unifies a fanbase, manufactures home court advantage, and creates the kind of visual moments that end up in highlight reels, social feeds, and national broadcast cutaways for free.

But sometimes the best sports marketing investments are rarely the ones you can measure immediately.

They're the ones that make your audience feel an emotion or build a lifelong memory that creates the kind of brand loyalty that shows up years later.

So the question remains: if you’re going to an NBA playoff game…

Are you wearing the shirt?

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FREE THROWS

Sharing the tools and resources that I’m using this week:

📧 beehiiv - Originally starting as a newsletter platform, it has evolved into a world-class all-in-one digital tool that helps creators grow and monetize online.

🎨 Claude Design - Describe what you want to design and watch Claude build the asset for you so you can easily export to Canva, PDF or PPTX.

🎙️ Sweat Equity - Weekly video podcast breaking down content marketing for today’s brands and creators that win on social media.

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POST-GAME

Thanks for reading! Here are a few ways we can stay connected:

🤝 Partner With Me: I work with brands, athletes and creators across their brand strategy, digital media, creator programs, partnerships, and marketing growth. Interested in working together? Get in touch here.

📊 Be First: I’m building Future Blueprint Sports — the definitive discovery and intelligence platform for sports marketing and creator culture. Get early access today.

👋 Stay Connected: Enjoyed this newsletter? Share it with a friend or colleague. Also follow me on LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok for more sports marketing and creator insights.

Thanks and see you later this week!

- Jeff Chen | 🏀💡👨🏻‍💻