Could Jalen Brunson become Nike’s next signature shoe superstar?

There’s a list of hoop dreams among basketball players that are unwritten and unspoken, yet universally understood.

At the top is make it to the NBA, become an All-Star, and win a championship. Then, somewhere between buying Mom a house, signing a second contract, and ultimately entering the Basketball Hall of Fame, there’s another big benchmark: having a signature basketball sneaker.

But not every player covets becoming the headliner of a signature line. In a resurfaced interview from two summers ago, Overtime’s Mikey Kaufman and a group of young basketball players asked New York Knicks star Jalen Brunson point-blank: “Would you want to have your own basketball shoe?”

His answer was humbly surprising.

“Honestly, I would rather have an unlimited supply of Kobes vs. my own shoe,” Brunson responded.

As an officially signed Nike athlete throughout his NBA career, Brunson’s sneakers of choice have always been models from the late Kobe Bryant’s culturally beloved signature line. According to kixstats.com, the two-time All-Star point guard has laced up Kobes all but 28 times in the 550-plus NBA games he’s played.

Though Brunson has told us he’d be content without a signature shoe, that doesn’t mean he isn’t deserving of the distinction. In the NBA, 33 active signature headliners are heading into the 2025-26 season. And, barring his affinity for Kobes, there isn’t a reason why Brunson shouldn’t be one of them.

Now in his eighth NBA season, Brunson is the league’s top headliner of the Nike Kobe line. He solidified that claim last season after leading the Knicks to their first Eastern Conference finals appearance in 25 years. Brunson rotated through a collection of Kobes in exclusive retail colorways and player-edition (PE) pairs that he led the process of designing.

He began the 2025-26 season at Madison Square Garden by donning his best PE to date — a hyper-turquoise and metallic copper-accented Nike Kobe 6, crafted to resemble the Statue of Liberty. Scheduled to drop this holiday season, the pair of Kobes will mark the point guard’s first retail release.

At the end of August, Brunson starred in Nike’s latest Kobe commercial. It was an Uncut Gems-inspired 60-second spot that featured Bryant’s eldest daughter, Natalia, and the “Halo” Kobe 3 Protro, which the Swoosh bills as the most extensive performance retro model of a Kobe sneaker to date.

Since Bryant’s estate, which is led by his widow Vanessa, reached a long-term contract with Nike in May 2022, only two professional players have starred in ads to promote the Kobe line: Brunson and WNBA star Caitlin Clark.

The day following 08/24 — an annual celebration for sneakerheads on the calendar date consisting of the Black Mamba’s two famed jersey numbers — Nike announced Clark as the brand’s next signature athlete. Her debut shoe is scheduled to arrive in 2026.

So, what does that mean for Brunson? Is the signature treatment on the way for him, too? Now might be the time to make the case for the Knicks’ superstar to receive his own shoe.

The top-selling points are pretty straightforward. First and foremost, Brunson is the starting point guard and captain of the New York Knicks. He’s playing in the world’s biggest market, with his home arena known as the “Mecca of Basketball.”

Crazy enough, in the past decade there have only been two players — Carmelo Anthony and Derrick Rose — who have had active signature lines while playing for the Knicks.

Secondly, Brunson is currently the clutchest player in the NBA. In April, he received the 2024-25 NBA Clutch Player of the Year award, established in 2022 and voted on by a panel of 100 global media members from a pool of players nominated by NBA head coaches.

Last season, Brunson dazzled in “clutch time,” defined as possessions in the final five minutes of the fourth quarter or overtime when the score is within five points. He was laced up in some of the best Kobe models celebrating 2025 as the Chinese Year of the Snake, or, as Nike dubbed in January, the “Year of the Mamba.”

A few days after he was named clutch player of the year, Brunson broke out his “What The Rick” Nike Kobe 5 PEs in Game 3 of a first-round playoff series between the Knicks and Detroit Pistons. Brunson teamed up with Nike to design the shoe, which features eight colored panels. The sneaker pays homage to his father, Rick Brunson, a Knicks assistant coach who originally put him on to Bryant’s signature line.

“I remember I was in eighth grade and the Nike Kobe 5 just came out,” Brunson said in 2023. “My dad got them for me and I’m wearing them in the game because they match my school clothes and everything. I wasn’t into low tops, but my dad was like, ‘Nah, that’s the new thing.’ I fell in love with [Kobes], and I never looked back.”

Fittingly, late in the fourth quarter of Game 3 against the Pistons, Brunson toed the free-throw line in his “WTR” Kobe 5 PEs and hit the game-sealing free throws to give the Knicks a win with a prolific 30 points, nine assists and seven rebounds.

In Game 2 of the Eastern Conference finals against the Indiana Pacers, Brunson, for the first time, broke out his ‘Statue of Liberty’ 6s, which immediately turned heads as one of the cleanest Kobe PEs basketball has seen. In his lone game rocking the pair last season, Brunson dropped 36 points and 11 assists on the hardwood at the Garden.

Online, the shoes were an instant classic, with multiple memes surfacing of Brunson’s face swapped with Lady Liberty’s on New York’s iconic stature. Arriving at retail in December, the “Statue of Liberty” 6s are the most-anticipated model Nike has planned for its Year of the Mamba campaign.

“Brunson has had a bunch of different player-only Kobe colorways during the season,” wrote Evans Miranda, the digital marketing director for WearTesters.com, “But this [Statue of Liberty] Kobe 6 Protro in particular is special.”

Given the opportunity to utilize multiple Nike Kobe models as canvases for his PEs, Brunson has delivered in design, performance and hype. That sure feels like a player who could sell a signature sneaker.

A point especially worth noting is that there is a collective of Bryant’s “Mamba Mentality” disciples in the NBA and WNBA who have received signature lines from Nike.

Memphis Grizzlies star point guard Ja Morant transitioned from designing a handful of Kobe 6 PEs during his first three NBA seasons to launching his signature Nike Ja line, which officially debuted in 2023. Now rolling out his third model, Morant has played more career games in Nike Kobes than in his own Nike Jas.

There also probably isn’t a single non-retail Kobe PE better known in basketball than Phoenix Suns star Devin Booker’s purple Kobe 4s, on which he’d scribble his most-cherished piece of advice from Bryant: “Be Legendary.” In 2023, Booker became — coincidentally — the 24th signature headliner in Nike Basketball history with his debut shoe, the Book 1, which he designed in a “Be Legendary” purple PE and unveiled it in L.A. against the Lakers.

New York Liberty star Sabrina Ionescu — one of Bryant’s top proteges and a friend to his daughter, Gianna, before their deaths in 2020 — has never designed any Nike Kobe PEs, at least that have publicly surfaced. Yet Ionescu’s signature line, launched in 2023, draws direct inspiration from her mentor’s sneakers, which she laced up in her first few WNBA seasons.

All three Nike Sabrinas have felt like intentional extensions of the Nike Kobe line, crafted in similar low-profile silhouettes with wide bases and equally distinct outrigger areas on the lateral sides of the forefoot.

While primarily lacing up Kobes in college at the University of Iowa, Clark became a national phenomenon before beginning her WNBA career as a Mamba headliner, earning the opportunity to design a collection of PEs. Her first retail release, the ‘Caitlin Clark’ Nike Kobe 5 Protro, arrived in late June and immediately doubled in resale value.

Another one of her PEs, the “Light Armory Blue” Kobe 6 Protro, is expected to drop in November, setting the stage for Brunson’s “Statue of Liberty” 6s to close out the Year of the Mamba with a December release. By next spring, Nike will unveil Clark’s signature line.

So, again, where’s Brunson’s shoe?

There has to be some level of discussion within Nike about a signature sneaker for him. Brunson has certainly entered the conversation of cementing himself on the Mount Rushmore of all-time Kobe PE headliners in the NBA. That list includes Booker; six-time All-Star and Los Angeles native DeMar DeRozan; the league’s longtime sneaker king P.J. Tucker; and two-time All-Star and journeyman Isaiah Thomas, with an honorable mention to Detroit Pistons forward Tobias Harris.

Another interesting detail and draw is that Brunson already has signature logos. Featured atop his personal website, www.jalenbrunson.com, is a custom “JB” initials logo. The Knicks star has also commissioned an illustration of the three-fingered hand signal he throws up, or places over his face, after draining 3-point shots. Brunson has been photographed walking into arenas wearing a beanie with the logo stitched on the front. According to a Reddit thread, the hat was previously sold on his website, but has since been removed.

There’s actually a notable precedent of a player turning a personally designed logo into the primary graphic of a signature shoe. In 1992, sports agent Leonard Armato, then representing 20-year-old Shaquille O’Neal, tasked a design firm to sketch a logo inspired by the 7-foot-1 center’s backboard-shattering, two-handed tomahawk dunk he threw down on national television in the lead-up to becoming the No. 1 overall pick in the NBA draft.

The commission resulted in O’Neal’s trademark “Dunkman” logo, first unveiled on the heels of his debut shoe, the Reebok Shaq Attaq, after he officially licensed it to the footwear brand to use for his signature line. O’Neal has since maintained the insignia as intellectual property (IP), incorporating it into his own brands and products for the past 30-plus years.

So, assuming he owns the three-finger graphic, Brunson could reach an agreement with Nike to use it as an official signature logo, allowing him to both profit from his own IP and streamline the design process for shoes and apparel.

Brunson’s celebration symbol also notably takes shape in three points, just like the Black Mamba’s iconic “Shozoku” signature logo. Designed to resemble a sheathed samurai sword, the graphic first appeared on the Nike Huarache 2K5, a nonofficial signature silhouette, though culturally regarded as such, that Bryant headlined before his debut Nike Zoom Kobe 1 arrived in 2006. That year also marked Rick Brunson’s final NBA season, when his future superstar son was just 10 years old.

By high school, Brunson coincidentally wore the same shoe size as Bryant, who once gifted Brunson a pair of personal Nike Kobes as a teenager. During the 2024 “Air Time” streaming event, hosted by the NBA and Nike to promote the launch of the Kobe 9 Protro, Brunson recounted the unforgettable story from a holiday high school basketball tournament during his senior year.

“The Lakers were playing in Chicago. Kobe didn’t play, but he had a pair of Kobe 9s he was going to wear — the red ‘Christmas’ Kobe 9s,” said Brunson in a video posted on Instagram. “He literally brought them out of the locker room in his hand and said, ‘Here you go.’

“Everyone was like, ‘What are you going to do with them?’” he continued. “[I said,] ‘I’m going to wear these the next game I play. Our high school had a rule that we couldn’t wear outside the team colors. I completely broke that. We were green and gold. I was wearing red. But we won the holiday tournament [while] I was wearing those shoes. Yeah, that was a cool moment. He just came out and said, ‘Here you go.’”

Imagine if Nike gave Brunson a shoe under Bryant’s signature line, featuring the sheath symbol on the tongues, like they’re featured on his current Kobe PEs, and the three-finger celebration logo on the heels for cameras to catch every time the Knicks star makes a cut in clutch time. That ambitious vision brings us to our final and most important point: Nike could come to a compromise with Brunson and give him a one-off signature sneaker — and it wouldn’t be the first time the Swoosh has done so.

In 1998 — after headlining the cult-classic Nike Air Bakin’, which many sneakerheads still regard as his shoe — then-Miami Heat star point guard Tim Hardaway received his first and only official signature model, the Nike Air Zoom T-Bug Flight. From playing the same position to their similar sizes and basketball résumés, Hardaway and Brunson feel like a personification of the Spider-Man meme.

It’s also worth noting that Hardaway’s Nike T-Bug Flight was crafted by the legendary Eric Avar, who was also Bryant’s longtime signature product designer at Nike, notably creating Brunson’s three all-time favorite basketball sneakers, the Nike Kobe 4, 5, and 6.

For the past two seasons, as he rose to superstardom and propelled the New York Knicks’ return to relevance, Brunson has paid his dues as the marquee headliner of the NBA’s Nike Kobe line.

But now it’s time. Give the man JB — aka “Captain Clutch,” “Big Body Brunson,” and “The King of New York” — a signature shoe. Why not also respect the man’s wishes and deliver it as a Kobe shoe?

The Nike Kobe Brunson — or, fittingly, the Nike KB — certainly has a ring to it.

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