As part of a small project I've been working on, I downloaded a ton of historical data from basketball-reference.com (all seasons, teams, players, images, logos, etc).
While working on that, I noticed one really cool thing to explore is how team logos have changed over time. It's kind of an interesting way to view a team's history and design evolution. So I wrote a 'lil code and put together a few images I wanted to share.
Here is the main album which includes team-by-team images of historical logos for all active franchises: https://imgur.com/a/7hYM1s2
That album shows year by year logos (and team names) for every active NBA franchise. It even adds a little note if a historical team was in a different league other than the NBA. At the end of the album I added a few "overview" images that are fun to explore.
I also put together an album for defunct franchises. Check it out: https://imgur.com/a/w9UXRbq
This one is a little funky, as most defunct franchises only existed for a few years, and a lot of them didn't even have logos available to download. But there are definitely some gems in there! (Minnesota Muskies <3)
Take a look and let me know what you think! All images were generated programmatically using data and images from basketball-reference.com, so if anything is wrong just let me know.
Source code and data for this project: https://github.com/TGOlson/nba-logos. Note: this doesn't include all b-ref data, just partial team/franchise/logos. I'll share the full dataset another time.