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and the recent rise in all things Penny has seen nike 95s these rise to the top as (along with the Pro edition) arguably the most collectible model released over the past three or so years. Click through to see more classic photos and promo materials as well as some insights from designer Eric Avar and stick with Sneaker News as we continue to examine the greatest Nike Basketball designs of all-time.

The Foamposite now needed its athlete. "We had it and we'd been working with it for some time and were, quite honestly, a little undecided on what to do with it," recalled Avar. On meeting Penny Hardaway to discuss the Nike Air Penny III, Avar brought along an early Foamposite sample. "I wasn't sure I nike 97 was even going to show that sample to him. We had other ideas we were presenting. But he leaned over, looked into the bag and said,  What is that?' He reached in, grabbed it and he says,  This is my nike 97s next shoe!' I was like,  Okay! There's the go-to-market strategy!'"

Once the Nike Flywire proved its mettle in testing, Avar and the team's approach was to create a design that allowed most of the shoe to fall away into the background in order to make the Flywire in the midfoot the focal point. Another new Nike innovation, Nike Lunarlon, would also make its first appearance in a basketball shoe as a key performance element of a design that borrowed elements from a shoe nike af1 that, at the time, was only the stuff of legend, the Nike Mag.

As we've looked back through some of the most influential Nike Basketball designs over the past twenty years, significant attention has been paid to the progression of certain designers and how they've captured an athlete's personality or the zeitgeist of the time. This next entrant represents the culmination of all of these forces and a transition into a newly evolved world as for the first time in 2006, Nike Air completely takes over the sole for a more durable and dependable cushioning solution than with a traditional foam midsole.

With the advent of the Nike Air Max 360 Air Sole, it was finally possible to create a shoe without foam, thus letting a player ball entirely on air. Utilizing thermoforming technology (versus blow-molding), Nike engineers created a smoother surface at the top of the Air Sole unit to nike air force 1 black attach it more securely to the upper. While foam has the benefit of an added cushioning tool, foam also compresses over time. So its removal meant longer-lasting consistent cushioning.

Today's chapter in the Nike Basketball history book is a discussion of one of many models that makes 1995-96 arguably the best season on record, but this story has its nexus somewhere between the 1992 Air Raid and Air Max2 CB '94 posts that preceded it. Draft Day '93 introduced the entire world to Anfernee  Penny' Hardaway , a brilliant oversized point guard from the then-relatively unheralded University of Memphis.