Jayson Tatum, the NBA’s fourth-leading scorer at 30.8 points per game this season, deserved a much better fate than this, waiting all this time for his first sneaker release, only for Jordan Brand to do him dirty with a hideously ugly shoe that is bound to cost someone their job. Just look at this breathtaking eyesore, a catastrophe setting the industry back decades.
The worst sneakers are usually the ones that try to do too much, a fatal flaw that Jordan’s designers were certainly guilty of here, cooking up a bloated mess of random textures, patterns and a colorway that would have made a heck of a lot more sense if Tatum played for the red-and-black-clad Chicago Bulls. If the fictional clothing brand Dan Flashes ever pivoted to footwear, this is about what it would look like.
We don’t want to give Tatum too much grief for what we can only assume was someone else’s vision (if you recall, Kyrie Irving openly criticized his signature Kyrie 8s, insisting his input wasn’t considered by Nike), though it’s hard to see this monstrosity as anything more than a complete and total misfire, a monumental failure that never should have seen the light of day. The good news is that fans, particularly in Boston, would buy practically any product Tatum endorses, even if it’s a conceptual mess that would have been better left buried beneath apple cores and ketchup packets at the bottom of a trash receptable at Jordan headquarters.
If you’re into comically ill-conceived sneakers that look like they were designed by a third-grader doodling on a Denny’s place setting, the Tatum 1s will be available in March.
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