An old University of Texas football coach loved to use the phrase that “You have to dance with the lady that brung ya”, meaning that what ever play they were using that brought them success they needed to continue to keep using.
About 3 years ago The Forest Lab was a fresh clothing company in the Inland Empire trying to make a name for itself in a fast and trendy industry. It was a very difficult job putting out a brand that was literally only being advertised via word of mouth. Meetings where held and ideas were constantly being thrown around as to how we could get the brand of The Forest Lab out to more people. These meetings would last about an hour before talks slowly started to morph into one of our favorite subjects, basketball, most notably the Lakers.
Being big Laker fans we would discuss things like, how the previous game went, trades, and who is better scenarios. All of our meetings would inevitably end in this same fashion. With Kobe Bryant being the main focal point of our generation of Laker fans, his accomplishments always helped us decide many arguments that involved Wade, Pierce, Dwight, etc. But there is always that one player that seems to get matched up for the big “show down”, and that player is Lebron James.
Lebron is built unlike any other player in the history of the game. His skill and dominance cannot be denied, especially with how young he is. He is the reason people become fans of the game of basketball. So for the argument of who is better, Kobe or Lebron, it is like trying to compare Shaq to Kareem. Both are amazing and can be debated about for hours but we are almost talking about two different generations of basketball, so it can never come to an agreement. All of our discussions would result in the fact that Kobe has more rings.
It was after one of these discussions that someone brought up nick-names and how your nick-name should fit your personality. The Black Mamba speaks for itself, it is the fastest moving snake and is the ONLY reptile that pursues an attack instead of attacking in defense. King James… well of course in a room full of Lakers fans you can imagine what things were said about this particular nick-name. Kings don’t choke when the pressure is on, Kings show up for all four quarters, Kings seek to dominate in all aspects of the game (i.e. Dunk Contest), things like that. Then someone said, “Man, only kings have rings.” And that was it…
Shortly after that the design was mocked up using a photograph of the Notorious BIG but instead of Biggie wearing a crown, it was Kobe. The rest is history…
The company took off and more Lakers/ Kobe shirts were made, and still are because we thought that we should dance with the lady that brung us. In doing this, one of the biggest bits of criticism we get on a DAILY basis is, why no love for the other teams in the NBA. Frankly we loved our nitch and we worked to come up with designs that we would buy and to be honest those designs did not involve Blake Griffin, Kevin Love, Chris Paul, Kevin Durant, and of course Lebron James. But after many nights of discussions and planning we thought why not… Why not let other fans get excited over designs we can come up with but for THIER teams. That is why we bring you these, our top ten players in the NBA. With this unveiling, the door we never thought we would open has been blown from the hinges. And if you think these designs are good, you haven’t seen anything yet…
(The designs come from an old set of basketball cards depicting players that became coaches. We liked the style so much we decided these would be a great template for our top ten.)
Black and team color shirts available at The Forest Lab Shop.
The Forest Lab Top 10
