New Balance releases the Kawhi V on October 21, and the change it leads with is a collar that sits lower than anything else in the line has worn. The launch colorway is Blue Oyster with Oxford Blue, a near monochrome treatment where the only real contrast is the N set large across the lateral panel. It is the fifth signature model New Balance has built for Kawhi Leonard, the longest running signature line the brand has, and an unusual thing for a company that had no modern basketball program eight years ago.
New Balance signed Leonard in 2018 with very little to put on his feet. The OMN1S came first, a shoe the brand marketed around him without calling it a signature, and the first model carrying his name followed in 2019. Everything New Balance basketball has become since then was built on that one signing.
That matters more than it sounds, because the brand had no basketball archive to fall back on. Nike, adidas and Converse all entered the modern era holding decades of hardwood product they could reissue whenever a new line stalled. New Balance held none. The Kawhi series is the archive, assembled in real time at roughly one model a season, and the rest of the roster was built around it rather than the other way round. The Maxey v1 arrived this summer for Tyrese Maxey, and the brand put Cooper Flagg in the 950 in June. Both landed after five years in which one player carried the entire category.
New Balance describes the Kawhi V as a combination of design elements from earlier models with the collar lowered for range of motion. Underneath sits a dual density FuelCell midsole and a Y shaped plate, and the brand credits a molded sidewall, a TPU heel clip and a multi directional tread for the stability half of the brief. The upper is mesh with synthetic leather overlays and a lightweight PU cage.
The photographs fill in what the spec sheet leaves out. The blue runs through everything, the midsole, the laces, the outsole and the cage, so the shoe reads as one piece at any distance. The N is the only element in a lighter tone. A small circular logo patch sits high on the heel counter, the tongue label reads new balance Kawhi, and the sockliner repeats it. The outsole carries a dense multi directional pattern with a lighter section visible through the midfoot, which is where the plate runs.
Leonard framed the brief himself in New Balance’s release copy, saying he wanted the model to highlight the first step and the first burst. The lowered collar is the clearest expression of that in the build, and it is the one change the brand chose to lead with rather than bury in a feature list.
The campaign is the most revealing part of the rollout. New Balance photographed Leonard in a tracksuit on a residential driveway, with a hoop bolted above a garage door, dry hills behind him and an older car parked in the shade. No arena, no crowd, no court. For a performance basketball shoe with a plate in it, that is a deliberate choice, and it lines up with the colorways. Blue Oyster and Oregano are both monochrome, and neither one asks for attention on a broadcast.
What that adds up to is a line selling consistency rather than volume. A fifth signature shoe arriving on schedule says more about the partnership than about the product, and New Balance keeps making that statement on an annual cadence regardless of what the season around it looks like. The brand has spent eight years turning one endorsement into a category, and the quietest shoe in the line is the one carrying that argument.
New Balance lists the Kawhi V at $159.99, which is where the brand has held the signature line and below most of what it put on its own October board. The Made in USA 992 and the Made in UK 991v2 Vintage Sports both list higher on New Balance’s site this month. Inside basketball it sits above the 950, which the brand lists at $119.99, and that gap is roughly where a signature model should land over a team shoe. Several release sites have rounded the figure to $160, which is the same shoe at the same price.
The Kawhi V releases October 21 at 12:00 am Eastern through New Balance in two colorways. Blue Oyster with Oxford Blue is style code UKLS9Q8 and Oregano is UKLS753, both at $159.99. New Balance’s own Kawhi collection page currently lists the Blue Oyster pair alone, though both style codes resolve on the brand’s image servers and the campaign still life photographs the two pairs together.
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