12/8/2023 0 Comments Kobe purple shoesVanessa Bryant and the Kobe Bryant estate moved on and started their own brand. And, to make matters worse, we found out Bryant’s contract with Nike was up, and once it ended they’d stop manufacturing his shoes altogether. Nike released more, but they were extremely limited. In the aftermath of Bryant’s untimely and tragic death, all his sneakers sold out at retailers everywhere. What we had was what we were going to get. Over their years in the NBA, they maintained a fierce on-court rivalry (which came to a head in the 2001 NBA Finals as the Sixers faced off against the Lakers) and a deep respect and friendship off of it.It was almost a calendar year ago that we saw what we thought was the end of Kobe Bryant’s signature sneaker line with Nike. Bryant was a part of the same draft class that saw AI taken first overall. It’s a fitting end to the shoe’s 25th anniversary celebration. Bryant’s tragic passing saw the shoe shelved indefinitely, though it looks to finally be hitting shelves in late December. The shoes were never made available to the public, with the plan being to finally do so in March. ![]() Among them were a pair of Questions featuring a white leather upper with yellow and purple accents. Before eventually signing with Nike, Bryant spent a year hooping in a series of hot custom PEs sent to him by every brand in the game. Instead, it recalls the moment, during the 2002-03 NBA season, when Bryant was a sneaker free agent after paying a steep $8 million to get out of his contract with adidas. ![]() This one isn’t exactly an Iverson classic. The celebration concludes later this month with the hotly anticipated (and frequently delayed) Question Yellow Toe-a white, yellow, and purple homage to the late Lakers legend Kobe Bryant. A bizarre collaboration with the Despicable Me franchise to commemorate a movie that was supposed to come out this year but got moved to 2021 due to the pandemic? Cop them now! The Question is more accessible and ubiquitous than it has been in years. A cross-brand team-up with 2018 NBA MVP (and current adidas athlete) James Harden? Sounds familiar. A colorway harkening back to his days as an elite high school football player? Done. Over the past 11 months, Reebok seems to have embraced every possible collaboration and story they could possibly explore through Iverson’s first signature sneaker. The result doesn’t feel like a tribute to a shoe so much as to the man who made it famous. It’s what Reebok has done with those releases, theming many of them around Iverson’s career, his hobbies and eccentricities (the Nice Kicks collab is themed to resemble a tackle box, nodding to AI’s lifelong love of fishing), and key colorways that helped make the Question one of the more iconic basketball sneakers of all time. But it’s not the quantity of new releases that has made the Question’s anniversary year so potent. New colorways and retros alike have dropped on a monthly basis, and sometimes more frequently than that. This year, however, the brand made the shoe one of the centerpieces of its line. Reebok has kept the Question in steady rotation over time, releasing a couple of new colorways every year (and sometimes more, if the year contained notable moments like AI’s Hall of Fame induction). As a result, the shoe has been in the sneaker spotlight in a way it hasn’t been in years. Given that Iverson’s impact was just as big on the culture of hoops as on the way the game is played, it’s been fitting to see Reebok roll out the proverbial red carpet for his first signature sneaker, the Reebok Question, over the last year in celebration of the shoe’s 25th anniversary. With the nagging sense that we weren’t quite as celebratory as he could have been during his career (it’s high time we put the “Practice?” conversation to rest), basketball fans have become eager to re-valorize him every chance we get. His influence runs deep-occupying the culture-bending shared by one-name legends like Jordan, Kobe, and LeBron. There’s never a bad time to celebrate Allen Iverson’s impact on the world of basketball.
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