I’ve always felt like JB is in a delicate position with its sig shoes.
The Air Jordan is the flagship and most expensive shoe in the portfolio, and with a few exceptions is designed to be the apex on-court performance shoe. This portfolio hierarchy and need for market segmentation then leads to the Melo, CP3, Zion, Russ, etc. lines being engineered to a lower spec and/or price point than the flagship.
It presents a bit if a catch-22 for the athletes. Going back to the early days of guys like Ray Allen, Eddie Jones, and Vin Baker, it was an honor in itself to sign with JB: you’d just been anointed by the GOAT. But your shoe (if you even got a sig) was always going to be cheaper, in price and quality, than what you might even get if you were in the non-JB division of Nike. It reminds me a lot of what Porsche has done with the Cayman/Boxster: deliberately underpowering its purer mid-engine platform because the 911 is the sacred cow.
I sometimes wonder whether someone like Luka would be better off demanding that the flagship shoe be HIS shoe. So for example, scrap these “special” Tatum, Rui, and other versions of the AJ36 and have two versions of the shoe:
"AJ 36": In whatever various GR colorways they’d release in. Keep other PE colors in this silo too, just not with player-specific logos and such.
"AJ 36 Luka": An SE-type version of the 36, with some aesthetic or performance upgrades and with Luka’s logo, team-specific colorways, etc. price it $5 more than the regular AJ36 to signal that it’s positioned as a slightly independent version of the flagship.
The marquee JB athlete gets to step in MJ’s proverbial shoes as “the” Air Jordan athlete, gets to call the flagship shoe his own to benefit from the apex engineering and quality that goes into the flagship, and gets the marketing high of having the most expensive shoe in the portfolio.
If I’m the athlete, I’d take that option — or a standalone sig outside of JB — before something that’ll always be a compromised product.