Starting around 2:45 p.m. Tuesday afternoon, a team of volunteers began draping shirts over every seat in Chesapeake Energy Arena.
The shirts have been part of all of Oklahoma City’s 20 NBA Playoff games entering Tuesday night’s Game 1 of the NBA Finals against the Miami Heat.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Jim Souhan might’ve called Thunder fans out for the monochromatic look in a column last month but the practice isn’t limited to Oklahoma City.
The Heat regularly adorn their fans with “White Hot Heat” shirts and plenty of other NBA teams have draped their fans with team colors.
The shirts are sponsored, with the Thunder’s marketing department coming up with each night’s design, said Dan Mahoney, the Thunder’s vice president for communications and community relations.
Tuesday’s sponsor is Midfirst Bank.
Jackson Kinnear, a 17-year-old from Edmond, has all 20 of the shirts scattered about his room.
They’re mostly souvenirs of what the Thunder has accomplished.
“I wear them around the house sometimes,” Kinnear said. “Some of the smaller ones I’ll wear out.”
His favorite of the group are the two most recent--the “Team is 18,203” shirts from Game 4 of the Western Conference Finals or the white “Oklahoma City” shirts from Game 6.
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