The KD 6 Texas Returns From a Year When Nike Made 31 of Them

The Nike KD 6 “Texas” enters SNKRS on November 17, thirteen years after it first turned up in Kevin Durant’s sixth signature year. Black, Urban Orange and Green Glow, the same three color names the 2013 pair carried on style code 599424-002. What makes this one worth a second look is not that Nike went back to the KD 6, because Nike has been going back to the KD 6 all year. It is which pair Nike reached for.

The KD VI arrived in late June 2013 as Durant’s sixth signature shoe, designed by Leo Chang. Nike’s launch material described an ultra-thin two-layer upper built on Hyperfuse with Flywire cables for lockdown, Nike Zoom in the forefoot and a Max Air unit in the heel. Chang said at the time that he and Durant wanted “a simplified design that was bold, beautiful and told a story,” and the brief Nike published pointed at the precision of a wristwatch. Durant’s own line was that the shoe had “the low and light feel that Leo and I concepted from the start.” It was built low and light on purpose, for a forward whose game was starting to live on lateral quickness rather than on size alone.

The season around it is the reason the model still carries weight. Durant averaged a career-best 32.0 points, took his fourth scoring title in five years, and won the 2013-14 MVP on May 6, 2014 with 119 of the first-place votes. Sole Collector’s colorway guide counted 31 KD VI releases between June 2013 and June 2014, and 35 once the Sportswear versions are added. That is a signature shoe treated less like a product and more like a canvas, for one year.

The 2026 pair reads differently depending on which side of it you are looking at. From the lateral side the upper is mostly black, flecked in mint green, with an orange toe and orange laces running up a mesh tongue. Turn it and the orange takes the front half. The Swoosh is Green Glow, laid flat across the midfoot, and the same green shows up three more times: speckled across the black panels, in the translucent heel bag, and along the edge of the outsole. A large orange KD logo sits on the lateral heel. The inner collar is lined in a deep burgundy that none of Nike’s four listed colors accounts for.

Nike’s color string for the pair is Black/Urban Orange/Football Grey/Green Glow. The 2013 original was listed as Black/Green Glow-Urban Orange. Three of the four names match, which is a closer return than most of the 2026 retro calendar has managed, where a familiar colorway name usually arrives attached to a rearranged palette. The paint-fleck speckling is the detail that dates it hardest, and it has survived intact.

Thirty-one colorways in twelve months is the number to hold onto, because it means Nike had an unusually deep shelf to choose from when it decided to restart the KD 6 this year. The pairs it has gone back to have tended to be the ones tied to a place or an occasion rather than the general-release makeups, and this is the one built on the colors of the school Durant left after a single season in 2007. Nike’s product copy for the release does not use the word Texas anywhere. The only place the name sits on Nike’s own infrastructure is in the image filenames. That reads as a brand assuming the audience already knows, and it is also a brand declining to do the storytelling it was happy to do in 2013, when Chang was giving interviews about wristwatches.

Retail is $135, which lands the KD 6 near the bottom of Nike’s current basketball board rather than the middle of it. The KD19, Durant’s live signature model, lists at $170, and the Aunt Pearl pair arriving this month holds that figure. The Kobe 8 Protro returning in the same window is $200, and the Air Foamposite Pro college retros are $250. The KD line was built as the accessible signature from the start, and a retro that keeps that position instead of drifting upward is a small piece of consistency in a year when plenty of returning models have been repriced.

The Nike KD 6 “Texas” releases November 17 through SNKRS, where Nike has it set up as a draw rather than a first-come launch, with Nike Basketball retailers carrying it the same day. Style code is JF6986-001 and the listed colorway is Black/Urban Orange/Football Grey/Green Glow. One caution on the date: at least one outlet runs both November 17 and December 1 inside the same article, so the earlier date is the one Nike’s own launch data supports and the later one is worth watching. Check Nike SNKRS and Foot Locker on the day. Durant’s current signature shoe is a very different argument about what a KD costs.

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The Sneakers Team

The Sneakers Team is the editorial desk behind becausesneakers, founded and edited by Nick Engvall. Nick has spent more than two decades in the sneaker industry. He built the original Eastbay Blog, led the first dedicated sneaker team at Complex, ran the first UGC and seeding programs at Finish Line, was employee number nine at StockX, and served as Senior Director at Stadium Goods. He hosts the Sneaker History podcast, and his first book, Small Luxuries: Sneakers, arrives in October 2026 from Motorbooks. Release details on this site are checked against the brand's own product information before publication, and anything we cannot confirm is labelled rather than stated.

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