The NBA used to be the birthing ground for some of the coolest trends in fashion in the 1990s and 2000s. That’s how you get players like Michael Jordan and Allen Iverson becoming cultural icons beyond their impact on the court. NBA players were cultural superstars who established the baseline of what was cool and popular.
Signature sneakers have been the benchmark for how popular an NBA player is, with the popularity of Jordan’s shoes leading to a spinoff billion-dollar brand that is still the biggest basketball brand Nike has. Despite the NBA and Nike’s best efforts, we haven’t had an NBA superstar whose shoes have been nearly as popular since.
LeBron James‘ agent and CEO of Klutch Sports, Rich Paul, recently weighed in on why basketball shoes simply don’t sell anymore on his podcast with Max Kellerman. Paul blamed it on the oversaturation of the market, as most NBA players nowadays have a signature shoe deal from somewhere. He also emphasized that signature shoes are not as cool to the new generation of youngsters as they were to Paul’s generation, who grew up in the Jordan era.
“There’s a lot of signature guys. There are so many signature athletes. Every company has a signature guy—multiple signature guys. Well, there ain’t that many kids that want signatures from. They don’t want signatures.”
“I don’t know if [players] are less popular, but the kids are less into all the things that we were into as it pertained to a player… We love to relive our teenage years, where things were what we thought was the hypest. Where we were so excited. The ‘wow factor.'”
“These kids today are actually in their teenage years; they can’t relive. We can’t force nostalgia on these kids that are actually living in their moment. These kids don’t care about the new nothing. They care about what they think is cool.”
Paul’s comments on the state of signature shoes in the modern NBA come after Brian Windhorst recently spoke about the downfall of Nike’s revenue and stock over the last few years. Windhorst characterized the Nike stock decline as an indicator that basketball players are simply not as popular as they used to be.
“Nike’s revenue has been really down, and Nike’s stock has been obliterated over the last 24 months or so, 18 to 24 months,” he said. “And this analyst at UBS, by the way, the analyst at UBS doesn’t care. They’re writing to their investors. And they basically said, part of the reason Nike is selling fewer basketball shoes is that basketball players aren’t as popular as they used to be. The reason that’s worth paying attention to is that it’s an independent arbiter who only cares about data.”
Nike currently has seven athletes with a signature NBA sneaker line. These include LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Victor Wembanyama, Ja Morant, Devin Booker, and Cade Cunningham. They also have multiple WNBA stars as signature athletes, such as Sabrina Ionescu, Caitlin Clark, A’Ja Wilson, and more in the future.
Signature lines for the likes of Booker and Morant have been praised in recent years for their innovative styles, but they haven’t been high-sellers. LeBron is one of the most famous athletes in the world, but his shoes have never been a huge cultural hit, although they’re considered to be elite shoes to hoop in.
If you extend the list to include Jordan Brand athletes such as Zion Williamson, Jayson Tatum, and Luka Doncic, it’ll further reinforce that these athletes don’t sell their shoes as Jordan did during his prime. There are far too many signature athletes being promoted by the major brands for it to have any resonance with the modern consumer.
Nike’s market cap, which was roughly $281 billion in 2021, has now dropped to under $70 billion. This was at a time when the company’s stock peaked at $155.3 per share, while we saw the same stock fall to $42.6 per share earlier this month. All the investment into high-level NBA athletes from the last five years hasn’t delivered the results the sportswear giant was hoping for.
There might be a realistic future where basketball shoes simply don’t resonate with youngsters like they used to. Nike itself have shifted a lot of their focus on creating casual fashion shoes using the bold colorways and ideas traditionally reserved for basketball shoes. Due to basketball shoes also being more about their function than their style, it’s also led to most modern NBA stars having signature shoes which just don’t look fashionable enough like a pair of Nike SBs or any of their other models.
Unless the eventual sneaker line around Wembanyama and his alien motif explodes and saves Nike’s stock from free fall, the popularity of basketball sneakers will continue slipping.
Some elements could change this, especially for Nike, like if Steph Curry joins them after becoming a free agent. But even Curry is available because the Curry Brand with Under Armour wound up failing, harking back to the original point of NBA players simply not being as popular as they used to be.
