Converse SHAI 001 Cheetah Closes Out the Lace Up Run as Shai Heads to Nike

Converse puts the SHAI 001 Lace Up in a Cheetah colorway on September 3 for $120, and the shoe is the smaller half of the story. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is on his way to Nike. Converse has a short list of releases left in the line the two sides built together, and this tan and Volt pair is one of them. A fall basketball drop at a sane price reads as routine until you account for what it is quietly closing out.

The SHAI 001 arrived in Fall 2025 as Gilgeous-Alexander’s first signature shoe, capping a six-year run with Converse that has no obvious modern parallel. He signed with the brand early. He leaves it as an NBA MVP, a champion, and a Converse creative director, a title very few athletes ever hold at a footwear company. The 001 was also the rare case of a signature shoe carrying a brand’s entire basketball category on its back, because Converse does not have a deep bench of current performance models to sit it next to. The original build wrapped the upper in a zippered outer shroud, which gave the shoe a look nobody else had and gave plenty of buyers a reason to pause. The Lace Up removes it. What is left is a conventional basketball shoe with a normal lace closure, and it became the first SHAI 001 offered in kids sizing, which tells you Converse wanted this version to reach further than the original did.

The Cheetah is the third and final colorway in the Lace Up rollout. The Lime and the Berry both landed August 14 and this one was held back three weeks. It runs tan as the base with Volt through the accents and a three-color finish, and the name handles the rest. Two of the three colorways in the group come from pairs Gilgeous-Alexander wore during pregame tunnel walks before they were ever announced as retail shoes, which is a detail worth sitting with. The tunnel has been his real medium for years. He built a reputation there that arguably outran his on-court signature line, and Converse spent the back half of this partnership converting what he wore into what it sold. This rollout is that process in its finished form, a set of tunnel fits converted into retail product on the way out the door.

Converse is closing the SHAI 001 out on the version it probably should have led with. The shroud was the signature detail and also the tax, and removing it a year into the line, in the same stretch the athlete is leaving, is an admission about which of the two mattered more. Nike has already started building the next chapter in public. Gilgeous-Alexander visited Nike World Headquarters in late August and the campus went up in Shai branding, including a “Just Two It” message teasing the SHAI 002 as his first Nike signature. Sneaker Bar Detroit reports that recent Nike job listings group the Shai and Kobe businesses under a single Global Merchandising Director, which is not a small placement. That is the context every remaining Converse release now lives inside, and it raises the harder question of what Converse does with the category once he is gone. The brand built a basketball program around one athlete and is about to lose him at the peak of his value. Whether the SHAI 001 leaves behind a platform or just a gap is the thing worth watching over the next two seasons.

At $120 the Cheetah is priced under almost every signature basketball shoe releasing near it. The Nike Ja 4 Dark Mode is $130 on September 4. The Nike Sabrina 4 gets a Superstition colorway at $135 on September 9. The Nike Book 2 Detroit Lions is $155 and the Nike KD 19 Gorge Green is $155 on September 6. Kids pairs of the Cheetah run $100 under style code A24986C. Converse held the SHAI 001 in a lower band than its competition for the life of the line, and that was one of the more sensible calls it made here.

The Converse SHAI 001 Lace Up Cheetah releases September 3 in adult sizing for $120 under style code A24961C, with a grade school run at $100 under A24986C. It goes up at Converse and select retailers. For where this rollout started, the Berry covers the August pair, and the Premium Ox shows the shape the line carried before the shroud came off.

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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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