The NBA’s free agent frenzy died down a couple months ago, but another one is just getting started.
On Oct. 1, a handful of established and rising NBA stars will hit the open market, and brands like Nike, Adidas, Under Armour, and a new generation of Chinese brands like Li-Ning and Anta have already begun pitching their next potential pitchmen.
John Wall, Giannis Antetokounmpo, DeMar DeRozan, Zach LaVine and C.J. McCollum headline the list of players who will become free agents later this week.
Player relation representatives from shoe brands are a fixture in NBA circles. They are in family rooms after games, in clubs, at the table alongside players at restaurants, at weddings, you name it. Just as an NBA front office would, sneaker reps have been gauging the interest of the talent pool under expiring deals, trying to lure a potential signee away from a competitor or retain their rights long-term.
For Wall, this is the third year in a row he will enter training camp without a shoe deal in place, but after already releasing numerous signature kicks with Reebok and Adidas, with merely decent sales numbers to show for it, he may have trouble securing a mega-deal his talent level and stature would otherwise warrant.
“Brands are always look for guys who haven’t been marketed a lot so there’s still a lot of runway in terms of telling their story,” says Nick DePaula, who covers the sneaker industry for ESPN and Nice Kicks.
That puts Antetokounmpo, the 22-year-old already pegged as a future MVP candidate, pretty squarely at the top of the 2017 free-agent class. And brands are already doing all they can to get his attention, including showing up to practice with a truckload full of gear – which happened to the Milwaukee Bucks superstar last week.
Generally, there are three types of sneaker deals a player can sign. First, there are merchandise deals, which are typically awarded to end-of-bench players who receive free shoes during the season and, in some cases, somewhere in the ballpark of $25,000 in credits to purchase gear from the brand they sign with.
Then there are cash deals, which the vast majority of NBAers are inked to. A player will receive $200,000 – more for those playing in larger markets – as well as performance-based incentives.
The most coveted type of deal is a signature deal. Reserved only for the NBA’s elite, players can earn anywhere from $6 million to $12 million, as well as royalties for sales and more lucrative incentives, like a million-dollar payoff if they win MVP.
A player like DeRozan falls in the upper-echelon of the second tier, the cash deal. The three-time all-star and Olympic gold medallist is not quite in the class of signature shoe players, and DePaula expects he’ll simply sign an extension with Nike— which shouldn’t come as a big surprise for a player whose brand is built on the notion of loyalty— and continue to wear the brand’s Kobe AD sneaker model.
“At this point he’s not likely to get a signature shoe,” DePaula says. “He would have to be with a Chinese brand for that to happen. But he fits really well with what Nike is doing. After asking ‘Who are the best scorers at Nike who can carry on this Kobe AD line?’ they’ve handpicked him, Isaiah Thomas, and Devin Booker. I’d imagine that he continues to wear a lot of Kobe stuff, and carry that torch.”
While brands like Nike, Jordan, and Adidas— who just last week passed Jordan in sales to become the second-highest earner in the U.S.– will always have an edge based off reputation, the Chinese brands are emerging as legitimate candidates.
“They’re super aggressive,” DePaula says of companies like Li Ning and Anta. And ‘aggressive’ may be an under-statement.
One prominent player agent told me the story behind how Li Ning lured Dwyane Wade away from Jordan brand back in 2012 when he was still a top-five caliber player. Desperate to make a big splash and sign a marquee NBA star, the Chinese brand let Wade and his camp come up with a number that it would take to sign him. Wade’s side threw out an outlandishly high figure under the presumption that Li Ning would “go away and stop asking.” Li Ning didn’t flinch. “It’s a number that would shock anyone who heard it,” says the agent. “The deal was essentially done on the spot.”
These days, Klay Thompson has emerged as a face of the Chinese sneaker companies through a successful signature deal with Anta. “He sold over a million pairs of shoes last year, which is a huge number- and before that deal many people didn’t know who Anta was. People see the volume of fans there and recognize that it can be successful.”
The Chinese companies are making a heavy push for McCollum and LaVine, in particular, two rising backcourt stars with decidedly different styles to their game.
If the last two rookie classes are any indication, the landscape is shifting here in North America as well. “I did an interview with Markelle Fultz and DeAaron Fox before the draft,” says DePaula, “and they were so excited to be joining Nike and loved wearing their stuff. But on the flip side, last year you had Jaylen Brown, Thon Maker, Brandon Ingram, and Jamal Murray— guys who would have historically gone with Nike— joining Adidas.”
This year, rookies Dennis Smith Jr. and Josh Jackson— two players who are poised to make regular appearances on nightly highlight reels— signed with Under Armour, following in Curry’s footsteps and seeing that the path to obtaining a coveted signature sneaker deal is shorter.
Of course, one name that is on everyone’s mind these days when it comes to the sneaker world is Lonzo Ball (or, more accurately, his father, Big Baller Brand architect Lavar), who shunned the traditional endorsement process to create his own brand and signature shoe. What makes Ball’s case so interesting is that he’s not a sure-fire superstar at the NBA level, but when the next LeBron James-calibre prospect comes along, it’ll be interesting to see if they replicate Ball’s idea.
“The biggest thing there is owning your own likeness. If you sign with Adidas or Nike you can’t do a backpack deal, a socks deal, or something that conflicts. So Lonzo can piecemeal together all sorts of other deals—the Facebook deal is an example— and they can do some interesting things that might really add up dollars-wise.”
But there’s a catch to the free agency sneaker wars: most all rookie shoe deals include a match clause, meaning that Nike, for example, will have ten days to match any offers sent to the likes of Antetokounmpo and LaVine. It’s the same structure as restricted free agency, where teams have a window— albeit far more brief at 72 hours— to match offers from other clubs.
And in a more competitive endorsement market, brands are being far more strategic in how they utilize the match clause. “In the old days, when a player’s deal was up Nike would say “if you want to go somewhere else just call me, tell me man-to-man and I can respect that.” That’s essentially how Curry shifted from Nike to Under Armour, but DePaula already sees companies learning from that mistake. “Now if there’s a guy they really want to keep, they’ll just match his offer.”
There are exceptions, like last year when Nike let Kristaps Porzingis flee to Adidas, or a few years ago when James Harden signed a mega-deal with Adidas that Nike decided was too rich even for their blood.
Brands can be quite cutthroat, too. When talking to players they’ll openly bash the competition, and could invest a good chunk of time in denigrating a given players current endorser.
“These shoe company people can be just as bad as people think agents are,” says the anonymous agent, “sometimes even worse. I’ve never been, and would never, ever, be as blatant as I’ve seen some sneaker company people be.”
You don’t need me to tell you that the shoe game is big business. In 2014, Forbes estimated that sales of LeBron James’s various signature shoes alone netted Nike $340 million.
With stakes that high, a market more saturated than ever, and less than a week from the Oct. 1 free agency date, the 2017 free agent sneaker wars are well under way.
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