The Saga of New Balance Basketball

There was this heavenly shoe once, lost to antiquity, that fit me so perfectly that I pranced around the shoe store in utter glee. They did not leave my feet for ten moons, and if I was a wise man they'd still be around somewhere as the centerpiece of a museum to my name.

But I was not wise. I was a fool. There will not be a museum to my name. Thinking that such a wonderful shoe would be manufactured forever, I traveled to the shoe store to find a replacement. "They are gone." I was told. "There is no more."

I was devastated. New Balance had betrayed me, as it has so many others, by canceling a shoe model after my love for it had been established.

As hard as it is to believe, that was a New Balance Basketball shoe that I loved dearly. I can't even find the shoe model online anymore, it could have been the 891 or maybe the 902, but those shoes don't seem to align with the shoe I still have dreams about. (Sidenote: Who else has dreams about shoes? Just me? Okay, moving on.)

The basketball shoe market clearly has some high barriers to entry. Teenagers get $90 million contracts.  The NBA All-Star Game has become a giant design contest amongst the brands. You've got random Chinese companies swooping in to sign stars. All to sell shoes to (mostly) kids who might not play a drop of basketball in the kicks themselves.

In comes little ol' New Balance, with a 'keep em at arms length' approach to athlete endorsement, and it's apparent that getting in this game won't be easy. It doesn't help when your old school models have been featured on lists like this, and the new school models have done things like this. And then Matt Bonner gets booed for wearing New Balance, and the cycle of uncool seems complete.

But New Balance presses onward. They have just released the BB82, their first basketball shoe in 4E widths since the 888 (a short EIF on the 888: Don't buy it. It's big and clunky and heavy. You can't run in it. The lack of movement it allows your ankle is just asking for an ACL tear). The back of the 82 looks decidely unblowupable. There's certainly little effort put into the aesthetics of the shoe, but I don't think people are ever going to wear NB basketball shoes looking for street cred.

Alas, I will not be doing a proper EIF on the 82 at the moment, as I can't just go around buying shoes all the time (blogger salary, fellas). But this bad boy is certainly on the list.