It is pretty safe to say that this has been one of the strangest summers in the basketball sneaker industry. While the reports of the decline in basketball shoe sales have been floating around for years, it hasn’t stopped non-traditional basketball brands from trying to enter the space to get a piece of the biggest players and prospects.
Last year we saw the invasion of Big Baller Brand and its outlandish business model but if you want to credit LaVar Ball for one thing, it’s the idea of independence for future prospects. You can relate this method to what we have seen with top prospects like Deandre Ayton and Marvin Bagley III, who both bypassed traditional brands like Nike and Adidas to sign with Puma, a brand that hasn’t made a basketball sneaker since 1999.