And a brash backup point guard playing in Beantown, who signed puma evospeed to the brand with a point-blank proclamation: " I ain't f in' with nobody else but Puma ."More players are wearing Pumas on the court than at any other time in NBA history. They've joined the Puma basketball family, which has a deeper and more tantalizing history than most would imagine. As Converse, Nike, Adidas and Reebok starred on court from the 1970s to the early 2000s.
Spoiler: Supershort deals with players would continuously haunt Puma's journey through basketball for decades. But it's a trend that briefly changed in the mid-1980s, when the brand puma clyde began courting star players such as Nuggets small forward Alex English. During the 1982-83 NBA season, no one could put the ball in the basket quite like the slender 6-foot-7 English, who made all puma ignite limitless 82 regular-season starts while posting an average of 28.4 points a game to win the league's scoring title.
English's proficiency caught the attention of Puma, which lured him away from a previous shoe deal with Pony.Puma didn't have to sell me too much," said English, an eight-time All-Star and Hall of Famer. Now 65, he represented the brand from 1983 to 1987, primarily as one of the faces of black puma the Puma Sky II . "The Nuggets back then, we were & very fleet-footed. We pushed the ball up the floor. We ran. So I envisioned my Pumas being the animal that they were getting me up and down the floor.
The same year English began wearing Pumas, the Houston Rockets selected Ralph Sampson with the No. 1 pick in the 1983 NBA draft. The 7-foot-4 Sampson had a history of wearing PRO-Keds in both high school and at the University of Virginia. Yet, as Sampson at the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, which he entered in 2012, PRO-Keds went on a hiatus fenty puma creepers shortly into his first season, halting the production of basketball sneakers.
With a strong product and perfect placement, Puma began to experience a basketball renaissance. "I'm playing alongside Jordan, who's getting fined every game for wearing his shoes & ," Matthews said. "He's getting a lot of publicity & so I figured Puma would get a lot of publicity and the brand would take off."Matthews was right English, Sampson and Milwaukee Bucks power forward Terry Cummings appeared in the 1985 All-Star Game, all wearing Pumas. Sampson was named
the MVP with a game-high 24 points and 10 rebounds.