The Most Underestimated Brand on the Floor Right Now
A Finals PE and a European soccer push are happening at the same time. At some point, the laugh track has to stop.
The thing I love most about this industry is that it keeps you on your toes. The brand you admire today may not be the brand you admire tomorrow. People move from brand to brand, and so does the energy. A brand that had no business being in a certain category can end up rewriting the rules of that category entirely. The game is unpredictable, and anybody who tells you otherwise hasn’t been watching long enough.
Skechers is having one of those moments, and almost nobody is treating it that way.
Two things happened recently that deserve more attention than they got. OG Anunoby, a key piece of the New York Knicks’ run to the NBA Finals, hit the game-winning shot in Game 4 wearing a player-exclusive Skechers SKX Nexus NYC Blue PE... his second PE of the Finals, not his first. Skechers built multiple colorways for a single championship run. And then he won the whole thing. Per the official Skechers press release, Anunoby is the first player in NBA history to win a championship in Skechers Basketball footwear. That’s not a guy wearing a brand because he has to. That’s a brand and a player who clearly built something together over time, invested enough to create multiple PEs for the biggest stage in basketball, and then delivered on that stage when it mattered most. You can debate whether Skechers belongs on that floor, but you can’t argue they weren’t prepared to be there.
Around the same time, Harry Kane was photographed in the Skechers Sunset Razor 2... and then went out and scored twice in England’s World Cup 2026 opener against Croatia, equalling Gary Lineker’s all-time England record of 10 World Cup goals. One of the highest-profile soccer players on the planet, wearing a brand that most of the footwear industry still treats as a punchline, just made history on the biggest stage in the sport.
What’s actually happening here goes beyond two athlete deals. Skechers has spent years building performance credibility, and they’ve done it in two ways: through technical innovation in their basketball line and through a serious push into soccer with product like the Motel Razor 2 Elite. This isn’t a brand throwing money at athletes for lifestyle adjacency. This is a brand building a performance case, piece by piece, while most people are still making “dad shoe” jokes. The Wall Street Journal put it plainly: Skechers went after the customers Nike didn’t, and it paid off.
