Clippers Notes: Jersey Sponsor, Thornwell, Inglewood

The Clippers have become the 20th NBA team to reach a uniform patch agreement with a corporate sponsor, announcing today that they’ve struck a deal with dating app Bumble. According to Scott Soshnick of Bloomberg, the agreement is worth $20MM over three years.

Bumble is an app known for allowing only women to send the first message in a conversation, and the idea of partnering with an organization with “strong female leadership” was a draw for the Clippers, according to the team’s announcement. Within their release, the Clips note that they have the NBA’s largest female leadership team. Meanwhile, ESPN’s Darren Rovell notes that the club is referring to the Bumble uniform patch as an “empowerment badge” and is pledging to invest in promoting gender equality.

“Never before has a major professional sports team partnered in this way with a female-driven brand like Bumble,” Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd said in a statement. “It’s an honor to partner with an organization as progressive and compassionate as the Clippers. Like us, they know generating awareness for diversity and gender equality is critical to business success.”

Our full list of jersey sponsors for the 2017/18 season – which now includes two-thirds of the NBA’s teams – can be found right here.

Here’s more on the Clippers:

• Clippers guard Sindarius Thornwell, who saw his minutes reduced for much of January and February, has once again become a regular part of the team’s rotation within the last week. A lack of backcourt depth in L.A. contributed to Thornwell’s return to the lineup, but the rookie believes his preparation also paid off, as Elliott Teaford of The Daily Breeze writes. “I think I came back in because of my defense and treating the practices like games and preparing for my moment, for my opportunity,” Thornwell said. “I think that’s what brought me back into the rotation.”
• The owners of the Inglewood Forum – the Madison Square Garden Co. – have alleged in a lawsuit that the City of Inglewood and mayor James T. Butts have held secret negotiations with the Clippers about building a new Inglewood arena, per Ramona Shelburne of ESPN. The suit, also detailed by Nathan Fenno at The Los Angeles Times, alleges that Butts pressured MSG into terminating its lease on 15 acres of property (that had been used by the Forum for overflow parking) without revealing that it was a potential location for a new Clippers arena — MSG was under the impression that the land would be used for a “non-competitive technology park.”
• We passed along more Clippers items on Monday, including notes on the team’s luxury tax situation and its two-way players.