Two games into a preseason that is being “presented by Orchard Supply Hardware,” the San Jose Sharks may face a far more formidable foe Saturday night than the Phoenix Coyotes. The local hockey team — in whose arena no space is so small it couldn’t accommodate another sponsor’s sign — has squared off against a self-promoting bail bondsman, who has turned his season seats into a free-standing, freeloading billboard for his business.

Jeffrey Stanley, the 260-pound, skillet-faced co-owner of Bad Boys Bail Bonds, has used T-shirts emblazoned with his company’s logo as a heaving, haranguing gorilla marketing campaign — a fixture of every TV close-up of the Sharks’ bench for the past three seasons.

Fans entering HP Pavilion will be subject to the team’s new “enhanced ticket policy.” It forbids ticket holders from promoting “other entities,” and according to Stanley, the other entity the team had in its cross hairs was Bad Boys.

Having exiled one of the most familiar corporate logos from their arena, the Sharks appeared to be on the verge of a First Amendment showdown — over a T-shirt. “What’s obvious,” said Stanley, as he and his legal team considered turning the Shark Tank into a constitutional wet T-shirt contest, “is they’re targeting just us.”

Sharks management announced the policy shift during the offseason by sending a warning letter to exactly one company: Bad Boys Bail Bonds.

Stanley said he was considering a T-shirt for tonight’s game with the words “Censored by HP Pavilion” stenciled over the Bad Boys logo. He said he planned to test a dress code he believes is unconstitutional, though he declined to say how or when the T-shirt might appear.

To the Sharks’ marketing department, Stanley is an Extremely Bad Boy, whose outré outerwear makes him a Thomas Paine-in-the-Butt.

Dictating arena fashion choices may require the Sharks to do better in court than they’ve fared in the playoffs. For a franchise that chooses to make its own bold fashion statement in teal, it’s a risky maneuver. And as the arena’s landlord, the city of San Jose could be at least partly on the hook for any lawsuit in which the Bad Boys prevail.

“It really gets kind of crazy stupid when cities that claim to be strapped for money invite lawsuits,” said Bad Boys attorney Don Kilmer. “If they lose, they have to pay attorney fees and costs to the prevailing party. And unless they’re going to start imposing a dress code (on everyone) to go to Sharks games, I don’t see how they get around an equal protection challenge.”

Assistant city attorney Ed Moran said the Sharks’ apparent attempt to single out Bad Boys Bail Bonds for a T-shirt ban, particularly in a building filled with T-shirts promoting all sorts of “other entities” — including rival teams, scriptural doctrine and D.B. Cooper — “sounds troubling.”

Milking it

Stanley is convinced he’s being stripped of his boldface blouse in retaliation for his decision to drop the Bad Boys’ paid sponsorship of the home team’s bench and the visitors’ penalty box, for which he paid $70,000 last season. He acknowledged that he’s milking the controversy for all it’s worth, however, vowing, “We won’t leave any crisis unturned.”

Like all professional sports franchises, the Sharks have no objection to sponsorships, product marketing campaigns or corporate branding efforts at its games — as long as they get paid. When fans look around HP Pavilion, they see naming rights for the Sharks’ bench have been peddled this year to Porsche dealers, while in the arena’s upper decks, signs for Skip’s Tire and Auto Centers jostle Chipotle ads for attention.

“We have a lot of advertisers in the building who spend a lot of money for exposure, and we’re trying to do our best to protect and respect their investments,” said Malcolm Bordelon, the team’s executive vice president of business operations.

With Porsche now sponsoring the Sharks’ bench, Bordelon was worried that the Bad Boys’ T-shirts would apply a visual hip-check to the car ads. “Porsche would probably say, ‘The signage behind my sign looks really great. It’s moving, it’s waving and it’s dressing up,’ ” said Bordelon, describing the T-shirted bondsman. “That type of ambush marketing is what we’re trying to protect them from.”

Retaliation?

Bordelon insists it’s not an issue of free speech, and while he acknowledges the new policy does involve “a judgmental aspect,” he said the team wasn’t attempting to protect its image from an unfortunate association with bail bondsmen. And he denied the T-shirt ban had anything to do with Bad Boys withdrawing its paid sponsorship.

After dropping his company’s sponsorship arrangement with the team, Stanley received a letter from the team’s management. It said Bad Boys’ previous “behavior” — wearing company T-shirts while sitting in four season seats for which the company paid top dollar — would “not be tolerated going forward.” The letter concluded with a warning that any future T-shirt wearing could result in expulsion from the arena and revocation of tickets without refund.

“Amazing!” gasped Margaret Russell, constitutional law professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, when the letter was read to her. She wasn’t sure the team’s policy was unconstitutional, but Russell described it as “a pretty silly rule. The city attorney might look at that and say, ‘Do we want to be renting to these people?’ “

Moran noted that the Sharks’ counsel drafted the rule without consulting the city attorney’s office, and that the city was at least partially indemnified against an expensive legal judgment. “They would come after us because we’re the deep pocket, or we used to be the deep pocket,” he said. “I don’t know why anybody thinks we still are.”

Contact Bruce Newman at 408-920-5004.