You're About to See These Basketball Clogs All Over Your Timeline

Stefan Kohli

Chris Kaman was an unusual NBA player. The one-time Los Angeles Clipper had a propensity for weird flexes—falling asleep during a game, posing with a dead cat before a Charlotte Bobcats game, fabricating a viral news story about Blake Griffin smacking Justin Bieber—but was also an All-Star, cracking the lineup in 2010. A true enigma, much like the new wacky-but-kinda-fire basketball clogs by streetwear startup Scary Kittles, dubbed “the Kaman” in his honor, which just dropped today.

“He came into the league as this seven-foot, goofy-looking white dude with long, blond hair who weirdly had an ambidextrous game that had this really unorthodox style to it,” says Evan More, co-founder of the LA-via-NYC brand. “It just felt like the perfect marriage, sort of like what we wanted to achieve with these shoes.”

Featuring an orange leather upper with embossed black lines emulating the grooves on a basketball, the funky footwear was designed by Scary Kittles co-founder Jack Herzog, whose day job is senior designer at fast-rising Brooklyn label KidSuper. The slip-ons turned some heads when the brand teased them on X in February, and they're bound to make even more noise on social media now that they've officially landed.

Herzog had the sketch for the clogs sitting in his back pocket for a minute. “I've been showing people the design for literally years,” says the 30-year-old. “Every time I always got a really solid reaction, even from non-basketball fans. It just kind of makes sense. It’s one of those ideas where I'm just like, ‘I can't believe this doesn't exist yet.’”

It took a lot of R&D to perfect the Kaman. The guys tried experimenting with Horween leather, the official material used for NBA basketballs, but it didn’t quite meet their aesthetic standards. They went with genuine leather instead, over a contoured cork footbed. But the Lebowski carpet of the whole thing is the green suede insole.“It kind of ties the whole design together,” says Herzog, adding he wanted it to resemble “playground-green basketball courts.”

Herzog and More were childhood friends who bonded over their love of “pretty bad franchises” in the early aughts. The latter was a New Jersey Nets fan, and the former grew up on the Clippers.

“That kind of puts us in a weird box of not having that much cultural equity for those teams,” Herzog laughs.

“They’ve got a little-brother-in-a-big-city dynamic,” More says.

They decided to channel that perennial underdog energy into a clothing brand, launching Scary Kittles in 2021. The name is a play on former Clippers shooting guard Kerry Kittles, who served a key role in the Nets’ 2002 and 2003 Finals runs and even came off the bench for the Clippers before retiring. The guys want to recapture the excitement of the early-aughts era of basketball culture they grew up on—the NBA Street video games, the rapper-athlete Twitter beefs, the ginormous fits—but with their own elevated spin. They’ve been releasing wonderfully goofy pieces, including a “Thicc Boys” tee featuring illustrations of James Harden and Luka Doncic.

“There’s a part of this brand that comes from a bit of arrested development, like trying to hold onto the fashion and the expression of a 9-year-old kid who's a fan of basketball, but also being able to justify that type of fanaticism and exuberance as a 30-year-old-man who is maybe going to get married and have children soon,” says Herzog.

The Kaman clogs may well be the perfect encapsulation of Scary Kittles’ vision. They’re a silly, self-aware, undeniably steezy expression of hoops fandom.

“This is the type of product that you could build a whole brand around—it can connect with people and get them to understand you in two seconds,” says Herzog. “That shit is so hard to do as a designer. It’s really hard to make one thing that someone will see and go, ‘Oh, yeah, I get it. They're weird basketball guys.’”

Originally Appeared on GQ

More Great Style Stories From GQ

• Rolex’s Biggest Release of 2024 Is…

• The 20 Greatest Nike Air Max Sneaker Colorways of All Time

• TAG Heuer Just Unveiled a Bunch of Epic New Carreras

• Kevin Hart’s Royal Oak Costs More Than a House

• Not a subscriber? Join GQ to receive full access to GQ.com.

• Every Single MoonSwatch, Ranked