The Washington Wizards have signed a three-year agreement with stock trading platform Robinhood to be the franchise’s official brokerage and jersey patch partner on home and away jerseys, starting with the 2023-24 season that tips off this week.
“We look at ourselves as a digital-first company and very innovative,” Jim Van Stone, president of business operations and CCO at Wizards’ parent Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), said in a phone interview. “With Robinhood, we love that we are partnering with an emerging technology company, and we have a diverse, millennial, tech-savvy market in Washington, D.C., so it was really a great opportunity for us.”
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The Wizards have not had a jersey patch partner since their deal with Geico expired after the 2020-21 season—the insurer remains a team sponsor. In 2021, then Wizards point guard Spencer Dinwiddie tried to secure a jersey deal with the team for his blockchain-based influencer app Calaxy. Dinwiddie said he was willing to pay the reported $12 million price tag, but the offer was nixed by the NBA due to rules against players partnering with owners.
Van Stone would not comment on the financial terms of the Robinhood agreement.
This is the first sponsorship in sports for Robinhood Markets. Co-founders Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev both grew up in Virginia, and Bhatt called basketball his favorite sport and a “lifelong passion.” The company generated $1.7 billion in revenue over the last 12 months and has a market cap of $8 billion. In addition to the firm’s logo on the upper left shoulder of the uniform, Robinhood will be integrated into the game broadcasts and serve as a presenting sponsor of the postgame show.
“We’ve done a lot of work to understand the really active Robinhood users even better over the last 12 months, and one thing we’ve consistently seen is that they are huge sports fans,” Tenev said in an email. “A jersey patch sponsorship is not just about growing awareness within the District, but garnering recognition in the other 29 cities within the NBA family.”
In 2021, Robinhood was heavily scrutinized after the Reddit-fueled GameStop frenzy, when it temporarily restricted trading of certain “meme stocks” and found itself the subject of Congressional hearings; the saga is now showcased in theaters in Dumb Money.
Van Stone didn’t want to address the events from two years ago. “For us, it was really about working with a company where their foundational core is innovation and technology and being market leaders,” he said.
This is the first major partnership for the Wizards since MSE bought the remaining 67% of NBC Sports Washington that it did not own and re-branded it as Monumental Sports Network. “It allows us to tap into the sports and entertainment piece, but the media piece for a lot of our partners is what’s going to be a game-changer,” Van Stone said.
He sees this deal as a case study for MSE moving forward, to see if future partnerships can tap into the 80% of the fan base in the market that does not attend live events at Capital One Arena.
Klutch Sports Group’s Property Sales division facilitated the deal between MSE and Robinhood.
The Wizards start their season Wednesday on the road against the Indiana Pacers.
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