Spencer Dinwiddie says NBA rejected his plan to pay $12M for a Wizards cryptocurrency jersey patch

Spencer Dinwiddie didn't just want to take over the Washington Wizards' point guard position. He wanted real estate on the team's jersey as well.

Dinwiddie, who joined the Wizards on a three-year, $62 million sign-and-trade this offseason, told reporters at Washington's media day that he attempted to pay for the Wizards' jersey patch to advertise a cryptocurrency. He was reportedly willing to pay the $12 million price tag, but was prevented by league rules.

He later tweeted his intention was to promote Calaxy, a token-based cryptocurrency app he launched earlier this year.

It remains to be seen who will be the jersey patch sponsor for the Wizards in the 2021-22 season, as the team's promotional pictures have so far shown jerseys without a patch. Geico had previously been the Wizards' sponsor of choice since the NBA started allowing promotional jersey patches, but its deal expired over the offseason.

Some other teams have seen changes in jersey sponsors, most notably the Los Angeles Lakers and their five-year, $100 million deal with Korean food company Bibigo (which might have been a bit rich for Dinwiddie).

Spencer Dinwiddie remains a big cryptocurrency fan

Dinwiddie has long been among the most outspoken cryptocurrency advocates in sports, once going as far as promising to allow fans to pick his next team if they raised enough money in Bitcoin, a set-up the NBA almost certainly would have spiked. The GoFundMe apparently ended up raising $1,160, well short of the $24.6 million goal Dinwiddie had set.

The NBA also once rejected a plan for Dinwiddie to tokenize his contract with the Brooklyn Nets, which would have basically allowed fans to invest in Dinwiddie's future earnings as a player.

If all these plans sounds like long shots from the beginning, well, that's something Dinwiddie is well aware of.

Dinwiddie didn't need a sports law expert to tell him most of these plans were unlikely to go through. Simply generating coverage for various cryptocurrency ideas, however, very well may have been his intention in the first place, as it in the interest of crypto investors to make as many other people aware of their cryptocurrency as possible.

A jersey patch would be a good way to do that, but so would headlines about that jersey patch idea.