All the Small Letters

An Exploration of the Words on NBA Jerseys

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander led the NBA in a lot of categories last season, most notably points and MVP votes. He also led the league in a less talked about (and less important) category: letters on the back of a jersey.

A Shai Gilgeous-Alexander Thunder Icon edition jersey, laid out like the opening credits to Star Wars.

This jersey was among the top-ten most popular in the NBA last season, and sure that’s mostly because Shai’s got lots of fans and kids want to be like him, but I’d like to think that a small part of the reason for the sales is the uniqueness of the name on the back:¹ “GILGEOUS-ALEXANDER” wraps around that #2 in a beautiful rainbow of a moniker. I can just picture the Powerpoint animation that hit peak popularity in the mid-2000s typing this name, slowly dropping in one letter at a time from somewhere on high.

Shai is having to deal with the same set of competitors gunning for his scoring title and MVP trophy, but in the letter department, he’s already met his match.

Yanic Konan-Niederhäuser, the Los Angeles Clippers Rookie from Sweden, ties Shai Gilgeous-Alexander for the longest last name in the league, each featuring 17 letters and a hyphen. That’ll be the only thing Shai has to worry about from his old team in the Clippers though, and this Swiss rookie in particular. At the time of this writing, Yanic has scored exactly one point per letter in his last name; Shai is already at 27 points per letter.²

These two extended surnames got my friend and frequent collaborator Danny Ball thinking - which NBA jersey features the most letters? Not just the last names, but overall including the team nickname, city, sponsor, and whatever else.

He did the dirty work, going through all 120 NBA jersey models for the 2025-26 season, and counting the number of letters that appear on each. Before digging into his findings though, we have to align on what constitutes a “letter”:

• We’re excluding hyphens and any other special characters. A to Z only.

• We’re excluding shapes that replace letters, specifically the stars in ORL★NDO and M★GIC and the Spur in SPURS.

  

• We’re including stylized letters in logos that are still letters however. Think the “M” Motorola logo on Chicago’s and Milwaukee’s jerseys or the “X” in Detroit’s StockX.

• We’re also including letters in logos, like the “NOR” the dinosaur is wearing on my favorite jerseys in the league.

  

The jersey with the most letters may surprise you. It’s not Shai, or Yanic. It’s not Shai’s cousin Nickeil Alexander-Walker. It’s not Antetokounmpo, or Wembanyama, or any of the other guys whose surnames are as long as their limbs. Nope. The leaders in this basketball(-adjacent) category are Bub Carrington, Justin Champagnie, and a bunch more players on the Washington Wizards.

They’re small letters to be sure, but there are 30 of them in these randomly capitalized “THE district OF COLUMBIA” x “Robinhood” jerseys. The Oklahoma City jersey with the most letters, for comparison, has just 18, hamstringing Shai and the other guys with wrap-around last names.

Wizards players make up 16 of the top 19 letter-dense jerseys, only interrupted by Jackson-Davis on the Warriors, the aforementioned Konan-Niederhäuser on the Clippers (who have a jersey featuring 21 letters³), and Evbuomwan on the Knicks (they he hasn’t actually played for the Knicks yet). After them, there are several more Wiz players, more from the New York Knickerbockers (there would be even more if they went back to this nickname), and another Warrior (Podziemski), before we finally get to Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.

Of course, if the Thunder could be enticed to trade Shai to the Wizards (I’d assume it would take the Wizards offering literally every one of their players under 30 to get Sam Presti interested), he would be repping 47 letters at once.

On the other side of the spectrum, some jerseys feature barely any letters at all. A few players have just three-letter-long last names (Isaiah Joe, De’Aaron Fox, Saddiq Bey, etc.), but none of them have the fewest letters on their shirts, because none of them play for the Portland Trail Blazers.

Despite having the longest team nickname in the Association (tied with Timberwolves), the Trail Blazers wear a jersey, their Statement editions, without a single letter on the front. As I talked about last week, the Blazers are one of two teams without a sponsor this season, and their logo is a … well it’s not a letter! Portland’s four-letter Rookies Yang Hansen (who shows Yang on the back of his jersey) and Caleb Love therefore play with the fewest letters in the league.

We’ve only considered jerseys for the current, 2025-26 season in this analysis (Danny had better things to do than rifle through thousands more jerseys), but we would be remiss if we didn’t mention some of the styles from NBA history that experimented with adding letters to the threads.

• In the 2020 Bubble, the NBA allowed players to use the space normally reserved for last names to print phrases that highlighted important issues in our society. Amazingly, none of these examples, which look like they barely fit on the jerseys, is as long as “Gilgeous-Alexander”.

  

• Then there was the 2014 experiment with nickname jerseys that gave us these classics.

  

  Serious question: if the NBA did these again, would Shai lean into his foul baiting and don “Free Throw Merchant” on his jersey?

Well there you have it, across my last two posts you now know more than you probably wanted to about NBA jerseys. As the season progresses, and the early surprises get ironed out in the sample size, I’m planning to get back to the on-court stats and strategies in the coming weeks. Until then, I hope you can watch the games with a little more appreciation for the jerseys you see flying around the floor.

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1. The perfect color match of the sponsor patch doesn’t hurt either.

2. For what it’s worth, Jokić is at 69 points per letter.

3. Including the letters “V”, “I”, “S”, “I”, “T”, “R“, “W”, “A”, “N”, “D”, “A”, in no particular order.