This is a story about the NBA and the Logo.Not that Logo.Almost everyone who follows the NBA knows its iconic league logo – Dribbling Man, the silhouette of Hall of Famer Jerry West, though no one likes to admit that the late Los Angeles Lakers’ legend was the model.This Logo is the one the NBA uses to announce that the league’s championship series has arrived.The NBA Finals logo, with the Script F, and the shooting star over the “I” in Finals.The NBA debuted the Script F in 1986, when the Boston Celtics met the Houston Rockets for the title. Forty years later, a slightly different version of the script logo will adorn the court at Frost Bank Center on Wednesday, when the San Antonio Spurs and the New York Knicks tip off the 2026 finals. The Script F has become as known for the championship series as the Larry O’Brien Trophy — which will return in logo form to center court Wednesday for the first time since 2009, and also be center court at Madison Square Garden when the series moves to New York for Games 3 and 4.Rather than put a finals decal on the floor, which some players complained about as being slippery — or, good lord, superimposing one on the court for the TV audience, as the NBA did in recent years — the league will paint the Script F logo and the Larry into the wood at Frost Bank and MSG.Like the Larry, the Script F logo means one thing: They’re playing for the ring. What other reason is there to do this every year? It means you’ve arrived as a team, or as a star player. You can put up all the numbers you want during the regular season, but if you don’t walk out onto a Script F/Larry court, you’re not in the rarest air — where the best of the best played.“It means a lot, because for my career, I’ve only been able to see that finals logo on TV,” the Knicks’ six-time All-Star Karl-Anthony Towns said Wednesday. “So it means a lot to be the person that sees the logo on their jersey and has this opportunity. The word ‘grateful’ is all I can say.”Back in the early 1980s, when the NBA was still trying to regain its footing after falling out of favor with large swaths of the American sporting public during the ’70s, the league didn’t have much on which to hang its hat. Magic Johnson and Larry Bird were just at the beginning of their pro careers. Michael Jordan, Hakeem Olajuwon and Patrick Ewing were in college. The NBA’s championship series was still being shown on tape delay — 11:30 p.m. ET, then-Johnny Carson time — to the East Coast of the United States.And no one knew what to call the series.CBS, which had the league’s broadcast rights in the early ’80s, called it the “NBA World Championship Series.” That didn’t exactly roll off the tongue like the Super Bowl, the World Series or the Stanley Cup. Even the NCAA had started using a catchy nickname for its championship weekend: the Final Four, in 1978. Each evocative. Each harkening back to memorable plays and moments. And, at any rate, the NBA’s version wasn’t the world championship series, as advocates of FIBA and other international governing bodies for the sport made clear to NBA leadership.Desperate to create some buzz, someone at NBA HQ in Olympic Tower — mercifully, no one can now remember exactly who, though the late commissioner David Stern’s name came up — pushed the idea to call the 1982 series between the Lakers and the Philadelphia 76ers “Showdown ’82.” It had a logo and everything. And it made the NBA’s championship look like a cheesy, made-up event that would run on ESPN The Ocho. (“Coming up after the Great Eastern Skeet Shooting Championships … it’s Showdown ’82!”)The Showdown ’82 logo. (Image courtesy of Brian McIntyre)“Remember how small we were,” said Russ Granik, the NBA’s deputy commissioner at the time. “We didn’t have marketing people, creative people, and if Rick (Welts, the 2018 Naismith Hall of Fame inductee who is now CEO of the Dallas Mavericks) was there, he was selling sponsorships.