Why LeBron ditched his last signature shoe and won't ditch the new one
Sep 17, 2014, 9:27am PDT UPDATED: Sep 17, 2014, 9:40am PDT
Last season NBA superstar LeBron James sometimes ditched his signature Nike shoe in favor of an older model.
At Tuesday's launch of this year's signature shoe— his 12th — I asked James about the problems with last year's shoe and what's he done to perfect this year's model.
"That's the great thing about my partnership with Nike," he said. "If both sides don't feel like the shoe fits the athlete then we're going to continue to go back to the lab until we figure it out and that's what we did.
"We went to the lab a lot. It hurt both of us. But (the shoe) wasn't performing the way we wanted it to perform at a high level the way Nike and myself are capable of performing."
James said he put more time into this year's model and has been working on it "full throttle" for the last three or four weeks. He also tested it during last year's playoff run.
"We wanted to get on this right away so we wouldn't have the same problems," James said.
"It's given me great response."
The shoe features new technology known as Hex Zoom that provides different levels of padding to different stress parts of the foot. The technology was developed at Nike's Sport Research Lab.
"It's a shoe defined by extreme precision as well as explosive performance," said Nike Brand President Trevor Edwards, who introduced James at an event at Nike's headquarters. "And it has everything that
LeBron needs in a basketball shoe. In a word, it's the best."
Nike has been on an innovation hot streak in recent years, with several game-changing technologies hitting the market, including its Flyknit woven-shoe technology and its Lunarlon cushioning technology. It's also on a patent tear.