NBA Style: the League's Hottest Trend Is Carrying Your Work Shoes

Around this time last year, we noticed that the NBA’s pregame tunnel stroll—the league’s answer to the Fashion Week catwalk—had been taken over by the humble dopp kit. Players across the league, draped in preposterous finery, were toting tiny bags.

But change is afoot in the National Basketball Association. LeBron James is a Laker. Jimmy Butler is a 76er. And in the uppermost echelon of pregame NBA style, the tiny bag has been replaced by a new accessory: a pair of sneakers.

Dallas Maverick DeAndre Jordan is doing it. Lakers gunner Kyle Kuzma is doing it. His teammates Lance Stephenson and Josh Hart are, too. But it’s really a trend because P.J. Tucker, the league’s high priest of drip (and its yes-it’s-a-real-award Sneaker Champ), is doing it, too. Like, really doing it: here he is with a pair of purple Jordans, and here with some Air Force 1s, and here with what appear to be vintage Kobes. The biggest and baddest basketball players the NBA has to offer are now toting their shoes to work, almost like a pair of heels they'll change into once they get off the subway.

What’s behind the shift? Why have dopp kits given way to rare sneaks?

Two main reasons, I think, and they’re interconnected.

The first has to do with a rule change. As we’ve noted, NBA players are now allowed to wear sneakers in all colors, not just ones that match their teams’ jerseys. The result has been an explosion of colorful kicks in the season’s opening weeks. Players have been taking full advantage: Houston Rocket P.J. Tucker wore Nike’s upcoming Fear of God-designed shoes last week, and Kyle Kuzma is sponsored by a sneaker resale app. Players are digging deep into their closets, not just wearing the team-issued shoes their equipment managers lay out in the locker room. And when you grab something out of your closet, you have to physically bring it to the office. Which brings us to our second reason: the bags are just so goddamn tiny!

NBA luggage has been decreasing in size in the last few years. (If you’ve got two hours, I’ll tell you all about how this photo explains the modern NBA.) The dopp kit has given way to the cross-body bag. Neither will fit a pair of shoes. Now, there are exceptions: when LeBron kitted out his team in Thom Browne during last year’s playoff run, he carried a duffel bag that certainly could have fit his size-15 kicks. And this year, Jordan Clarkson has displayed a bizarre affinity for the kind of leather satchel my friend Sam describes as “like when you go to a flea market desperate to spend money and all they have is this thing so you buy it.” But for the most part, luggage is an afterthought. So sneakers go in the hand.

But they’re not just sneakers anymore. Now, carried manually down the pregame tunnel, they’re something new: accessories. Stylist Kesha McLeod, whose clients include last year’s MVP James Harden, notes that the hand-carried shoe is the final frontier of professional accessorizing. “They already have the backpack. They already have the toiletries. They already have their Beats headphones,” she tells me over the phone. “Why not add a different element to what they do?” Why not, indeed! The NBA, like every other professional sport, is a copycat league. When someone figures out something that works, everyone is quick to do the same. That’s true of the Warriors’ “elevator doors” set, and it’s true of fashion. The shoe-in-hand is just the latest not-yet-trickled-down innovation. “They're already checking out Barneys,” McLeod says. “They're shopping out Bergdorf [Goodman]. And they're all wearing the same thing! So we needed something different.”