PUMA has November 13 on a new All-Pro NITRO 2, and the most interesting thing about the shoe is not on its product page. It is on the shoe. A rubber badge sits on the forefoot of both pairs reading BRICKLEY DESIGN AND ENGINEERING, GAME IMPROVEMENT SERVICES. The same badge repeats at both heels. The outsole is debossed with the words KEEP GROWING. PUMA’s own listing for the Race to Evolve mentions none of it, and names nobody.
The All-Pro NITRO is the shoe PUMA Hoops builds for everyone without a name on a box. LaMelo Ball has the MB line, Tyrese Haliburton has the Hali, and the All-Pro carries the same technology for the rest of the roster. In most basketball ranges that is the quietest shelf in the building. PUMA has done the opposite with it. Look at what the brand currently lists on its own site under this one model: a standard pair, a Core, a Frost, a Hooptopia, an ET, a Flaujae for Flaujae Johnson, a Giddey for Josh Giddey, an Elite at the top of the range and an Empire Legacy built with the trainer Chris Brickley. That is more live variants than either signature line carries. The team shoe has quietly become the busiest platform PUMA Hoops has, which also makes it the one the brand can experiment on without spending a signature athlete’s goodwill. A bad MB colorway is a problem for LaMelo Ball. A bad All-Pro colorway is a problem for nobody, and that freedom is visible in how strange some of these have been allowed to get.
The Race to Evolve is a navy and white knit that reads as raw denim from a few feet away, cut with gray suede overlays at the toe and heel, speckled gray laces and a translucent speckled outsole. PUMA names the color Galactic Gray, Gray Echo and PUMA Silver. The details are where it gets specific. The two tongues do not match. One carries a pair of crossed checkered racing flags, the other the PUMA cat, and nothing on the page explains why. A small faceted diamond mark sits beside the Brickley badge on each heel. The outsole script runs across a wavy topographic tread that looks drawn rather than engineered. And the midsole wall is stamped NITRO SQD, the foam PUMA names in its own copy for the standard All-Pro NITRO 2, while the bullet points on this listing credit NITROFOAM instead. The shoe and the page disagree about what is under the foot, which is worth knowing before anyone quotes either one.
Brickley is a trainer rather than a player, and PUMA already sells one All-Pro with his name on it, so the silence here is strange rather than mysterious. A collaboration the brand has run before, on the same model, arrives with the collaborator’s logo in three places and no mention in the copy. The likeliest explanation is sequencing, a product page built and pushed live before the campaign behind it is ready to speak. What that leaves is a shoe going on sale wearing somebody else’s branding with no story attached to it, and a pair of checkered flags on the tongue carrying the whole argument. Race to Evolve and Keep Growing are not colorway names. They are a slogan from a gym, arriving three weeks before anyone explains it. Every detail above was read off PUMA’s own product photography, because the copy next to it offers nothing to read.
The Race to Evolve asks $140, and the ladder around it is odd in both directions. PUMA currently lists the standard All-Pro NITRO 2 at $104.99 and the Empire Legacy by Chris Brickley at the same figure, while the Giddey player edition matches this pair at $140 and the All-Pro NITRO 2 Elite sits at $205. More to the point, the two PUMA signature basketball shoes on the launch calendar right now, the MB.06 Hills and the Salehe Bembury Hali 1 Pace, are both $130. The team model is now priced above the shoes with athletes’ names on them, which is a reversal of how basketball lines have been built for thirty years.
The All-Pro NITRO 2 Race to Evolve in Galactic Gray, Gray Echo and PUMA Silver, style 314147_01, releases November 13 at PUMA at $140. PUMA’s listing says orders open at 5 AM UTC, which is midnight Eastern on the 13th. The upper is at least 20 percent recycled material by the brand’s own accounting, and the shoe runs regular width on a lace closure. For a look at how far PUMA’s nitrogen-injected foams have gone in the other direction, the FAST-RB NITRO Elite 2 landed earlier this month.
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