How China Quietly Signed Half The NBA

[00:00:00]A 17-year-old boarded a train to Beijing with 600 pairs of shoes hoping to sell them one pair at a time. Almost 40 years later, his country's sneaker companies would pay Stephen Curry $400 and pull a whole roster of NBA stars away from the American shoe giants while the brand that kid built quietly bought a piece of one of the most famous sneaker labels on Earth.

[00:00:24]Most Americans still can't pronounce their names and the strangest part is how they pulled it off by handing those players the one thing Nike almost never gives anyone. In the winter of 2006, a journeyman guard named Damon Jones was playing for the Cleveland Cavaliers. He had made his name as a spot-up shooter, the kind of guy coaches loved for his spacing and fans mostly forgot. He was not famous and he was not a star.

[00:00:49]And a Chinese sneaker brand nobody in America had ever heard of built its entire China launch around his face with billboards, television commercials, and life-size statues of him going up in 2,500 stores across the country.

[00:01:03]Statues of a backup guard most Cleveland fans couldn't pick out of a lineup standing in the entryways of sneaker shops from Beijing to Chengdu. The brand signed him to be the first NBA player it had ever represented and sent a signal to every other Chinese sneaker company in the country. The NBA was open for business. That company was Li-Ning and what it figured out in 2006 with a three-point specialist who barely played would eventually lead to a $400 deal with one of the greatest shooters who ever lived.

[00:01:34]To understand why, you have to go back to a factory town on the southeastern coast of China, to a city called Jinjiang, and to a teenager who had no plan other than not to fail.

[00:01:46]His name was Ding Shizhong. In 1987, when he was 17, his family gave him 10,000 yuan and 600 pairs of shoes made in the Jinjiang factories and he boarded a train to Beijing.

[00:01:59]He sold them door-to-door, one pair at a time, working the sidewalks and storefronts of a city that had no reason to buy from a kid with a suitcase full of shoes from a province nobody thought about.

[00:02:10]He went home, came back, went home again.

[00:02:14]What he was learning, in ways he probably couldn't have named at the time, was that you could not advertise your way into someone's trust. You had to earn it in front of them.

[00:02:24]The shoe either sold or it didn't, and no amount of enthusiasm changed that.

[00:02:29]In 1991, Ding founded a company. He called it Anta. It operated out of Jinjiang, which by that point had become one of the world's most concentrated sneaker manufacturing zones. Hundreds of factories, shoe chemicals in the air, entire families employed in the industry for generations.

[00:02:46]Anta was one of dozens of brands scrambling for domestic market share.

[00:02:51]Mostly selling cheap product to Chinese consumers who couldn't afford Nike prices. It had no particular claim to distinction. What it had was Ding, who was by now a student of how attention gets transferred. He had watched Nike make Jordan, and he understood that a brand selling shoes was really selling proximity to something people already admired.

[00:03:12]The test came at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. A table tennis player named Kong Linghui, who was already one of China's most celebrated athletes, was preparing to compete.

[00:03:23]Table tennis was a sport that generated almost no endorsement money globally, but inside China it carried the weight that basketball carries in America.

[00:03:31]A discipline where Chinese athletes had been dominant for decades, where a gold medal meant national pride on a massive scale.

[00:03:39]Ding saw something most business people would have missed.

[00:03:42]He saw that Kong was not a table tennis player. He was a delivery mechanism for credibility that couldn't be built in a factory. Anta signed Kong Linghui and bet a meaningful piece of the company on his face appearing in their advertising during the Olympics. Kong won gold in Sydney. His image played on hundreds of millions of Chinese televisions in ANTA's shoes.

[00:04:06]The company's China market share jumped past 13% almost immediately. The brand that had been one of dozens was suddenly one of the ones worth talking about.

[00:04:16]The lesson Ding drew from that was the one he'd carry for the next 25 years.

[00:04:20]You cannot manufacture credibility. You can only buy it. And the best way to buy it is to get there first before the price goes up.

[00:04:28]He'd proven he could buy a Chinese champion. The next question was whether he could buy an American one. Li-Ning was actually the first Chinese sneaker company to take that question seriously at scale.

[00:04:41]Its founder had credentials Ding could only dream about. He was Li-Ning himself. A gymnast who had won six medals at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

[00:04:50]A man so famous in China that he was chosen to light the cauldron at the 2008 Beijing games.

[00:04:57]Li-Ning, the company had launched in 1989 around that founder's fame, which made it a kind of Chinese Jordan brand, a company built on the credibility of its athlete founder.

[00:05:08]By 2006, it was Li-Ning that took the first step into the NBA with Damon Jones, with statues, with billboards, with the bet that a Chinese brand wearing an American player's face could reach Chinese basketball fans the same way Kong Linghui had reached table tennis fans.

[00:05:24]ANTA was watching. It signed its first NBA athlete in 2007, a forward named Luis Scola, who played for the Rockets.

[00:05:32]Then added the first big name in its history when it brought on Kevin Garnett in 2010.

[00:05:37]Garnett was the first All-Star to sign a Chinese shoe deal, and his face on an ANTA ad, a Hall of Famer, a champion, a player everyone knew, was the most credible thing the brand had ever attached its name to.

[00:05:50]Peak, a smaller Fujian company, was doing the same thing with different players. Jason Kidd, Tony Parker, a roster of role players and fading stars who brought real NBA credibility to stores in cities where their names meant something most Americans couldn't explain. But all of it was still the rental model. Cash for face time. A player wears the logo, poses for the photo, banks the check. And when the contract runs out, everybody moves on.

[00:06:17]There was no marriage in any of it.

[00:06:20]There was just commerce.

[00:06:22]The moment that changed that was the moment an All-Star walked out of the Jordan Brand offices in 2012 with no deal and a different idea. His name was Dwyane Wade. He had three championships.

[00:06:33]He had been the best player on the floor in one of the most famous finals of all time.

[00:06:37]And he had spent years as part of Jordan's sneaker company, not Nike's house brand, but the sub brand built around Michael Jordan's name. Which was the closest thing to ownership any athlete had ever gotten inside the American shoe machine.

[00:06:52]A Jordan Brand deal meant wearing MJ's logo, operating inside MJ's world, selling a product that still belonged, ultimately, to Nike.

[00:07:00]Wade was one of the biggest stars in the sport. Jordan Brand was still Nike's.

[00:07:04]The check was good and the credibility was real, but the ceiling was clear. The brand's name was never going to be his.

[00:07:11]Li-Ning called.

[00:07:13]The offer, when ESPN reported it, was a 10-year deal worth under $60 million in cash.

[00:07:20]Less, actually, than what a Jordan Brand deal of that era would have paid a player of Wade's caliber. That's the number most people never absorbed because the bigger number made a better headline.

[00:07:31]Wade left Jordan Brand for less guaranteed cash.

[00:07:35]He did it because Li-Ning also offered him something Nike had never offered anyone except Michael Jordan himself. A sub brand with his name on it, creative control over the product, the title of chief brand officer, and by his own account, a stake in the brand he was helping rebuild. That was the deal. The rental had become a marriage.

[00:07:54]Wade wasn't just wearing Li-Ning, he was building the line that carried his own name. The subbrand was called Way of Wade. Li-Ning distributed it in more than 5,000 stores across China, plus 11 standalone Wade stores that existed for no other purpose than his shoe.

[00:08:12]Wade designed the product, shaped the marketing, flew to China for launch events that drew crowds so large they shut down city blocks.

[00:08:20]He said publicly that he could have gotten a bigger check elsewhere and chose the ownership model instead.

[00:08:27]"I tried to set out to build a legacy for myself and my family," he said at the lifetime deal signing in 2018 when Li-Ning converted the original agreement into something [music] with no expiration date.

[00:08:39]That is the ownership model in its purest form. Nike rents, Li-Ning married.

[00:08:45]Now, not every Chinese deal works this way, and that matters for understanding what these brands are actually doing.

[00:08:52]Klay Thompson signed with Anta in 2014, and what he got was real money. A 10-year deal worth up to $80 million in 2017, plus royalties tied to KT line sales in China, plus a lifetime deal in 2026 that was Anta's first ever lifetime basketball contract. Anta sold more than 10 million pairs of Klay's signature shoes over the decade.

[00:09:17]The KT line became one of the best-selling basketball shoe lines in China, prices running from around 70 to nearly $200.

[00:09:25]By any measure, Klay Thompson's Anta relationship made him wealthy and made Anta credible, but Klay Thompson does not have a subbrand. There is no Thompson brand inside Anta. His deal is cash and royalties and loyalty, generous and real and built to last.

[00:09:43]But there is no line that carries his name the way Way of Wade carries Wade's.

[00:09:47]That distinction matters because the ownership model is not something Chinese brands hand out like candy. They hand it to the player who can actually move the culture and then they move the market.

[00:09:58]Wade moved the culture and then something nobody planned made the market move on its own.

[00:10:04]By the time Kyrie Irving was making his decision in the summer of 2023, the world had changed in ways that would have been unimaginable to Damon Jones in 2006. Nike and Kyrie had been together for 11 years. He had his own signature line, the Kyrie series, shoes beloved by guards and point guards around the league for their grip and their low profile.

[00:10:26]And then the fallout that forced Nike to walk away and Kyrie was a free agent in the sneaker world for the first time in more than a decade. Anta signed him in July 2023, 5 years worth an estimated 100 million dollars or more.

[00:10:43]And they did not make him a spokesperson or an endorser. They made him chief creative officer.

[00:10:49]The distinction mattered. Kyrie's first Anta shoe, the Kai 1, sold out repeatedly. But the deeper story was what his creative officer title let him do. He signed his own teammates to the line, Daniel Gafford, Caris LeVert, Derrick Jones Jr. Players from his world wearing his shoe inside a brand he helped to run. He traveled to Bangkok in 2025 for an Anta flagship event and the scene looked less like a shoe promotion and more like a concert.

[00:11:20]Fans bought from his collection because each purchase came with a ticket to meet him. A brand from Fujian had turned an NBA player into a one-man market entry system for a city of 10 million people.

[00:11:32]That is the argument for a market of more than a billion people made concrete. Chinese brands are not signing NBA players to sell shoes in Ohio.

[00:11:41]They're signing them to open doors in Chengdu and Bangkok and Shanghai, where basketball fandom is real and deep, and where a player's face on a product means something that no amount of advertising can replicate.

[00:11:54]Ding Shizhong understood this in 2000 with a table tennis player. By 2023, it was operating at a scale he could barely have imagined from that train to Beijing.

[00:12:04]Around the same time Kyrie was finding his way to Anta, another player was navigating the downside of the same gold rush. Dwight Howard had signed with Peak in 2015 a few years after his Adidas deal had lapsed.

[00:12:16]Peak was a different kind of Chinese brand, not one flagship superstar, but a roster. 17 NBA players at its peak, a volume play that gave the brand court presence across the league.

[00:12:28]Howard was the marquee name in that strategy, and Peak built him a real signature line, the DH series, including what was marketed as the first 3D printed NBA signature shoe.

[00:12:39]It was genuine product innovation.

[00:12:42]Howard had credibility. The deal made sense.

[00:12:45]Then in 2025, Howard said something in an interview that sounded like a warning label. Peak, he said, still owed him money from their contract.

[00:12:54]Money he would never see because collecting from a Chinese company in an American court was not a battle anyone was winning. His words, "They actually owe me a lot of money.

[00:13:06]But it's a Chinese company, so like if something happens in the States and you try to fight it in China, you're not going to win that battle."

[00:13:14]He also mentioned in the same conversation that Nike had passed on him when he was 18 because they said he didn't have enough personality.

[00:13:22]Nike turned him away as a kid, and Peak paid him as a man. But the jurisdiction of the dispute lived in a different legal system from the one he operated in.

[00:13:32]That's the cautionary tale behind the gold rush.

[00:13:35]The money is real, the products are real, the China audience is real, but the contract terms you can enforce from Charlotte or Houston depend on where the dispute gets adjudicated. And the answer to that question is rarely simple.

[00:13:49]Dwight Howard lost that battle quietly.

[00:13:52]The players who came after him largely did not change course. Jimmy Butler signed with Li-Ning with a connection he'd built through Dwyane Wade, who had personally vouched for the brand.

[00:14:03]CJ McCollum had left Nike in 2017 for a richer deal with Li-Ning. Fred VanVleet signed with Li-Ning and said plainly that he was trying to get paid.

[00:14:13]Andrew Wiggins moved to Peak. Aaron Gordon signed with a smaller Chinese company called 361° in 2020, became the face of their basketball line, and then did something that illustrated exactly how these deals compound.

[00:14:28]He talked to his Denver Nuggets teammate Nikola Jokic.

[00:14:32]In the fall of 2023, the reigning three-time MVP, a player many considered the best in the world, signed with 361°.

[00:14:42]Jokic said he liked the quality of the shoe and that 361 had shown up with respect.

[00:14:48]His own signature shoe, The Joker 1, launched in December 2024. The best player on Earth was on a brand most American fans couldn't find in a store.

[00:14:58]Across four Chinese brands, Li-Ning, Anta, Peak, 361°, dozens of NBA players had now signed deals over the span of a decade.

[00:15:07]>> [music] >> Not half the league, not 50 players, but enough to fill a full roster and a half from a standing start, building over 20 years from a journeyman in Cleveland all the way to an MVP from Serbia. And then the market did something the brands didn't have to engineer.

[00:15:24]In March 2021, Chinese internet users surfaced an old statement that the Swedish clothing retailer H&M had made about Xinjiang cotton.

[00:15:33]H&M had expressed concern about reports of forced labor in the region and had pledged not to source cotton from there.

[00:15:39]China's state media named H&M, Nike, and Adidas, all members of an organization called the Better Cotton Initiative, a group that had paused Xinjiang sourcing and called for a consumer boycott.

[00:15:51]The backlash was fast and total. H&M was wiped from Chinese e-commerce platforms.

[00:15:57]Nike's greater China revenue growth went negative for four consecutive quarters.

[00:16:02]Foreign sportswear brands' combined China sales fell roughly 24% over the following year.

[00:16:08]Anta's response came on March 24th, 2021. The company announced it was quitting the Better Cotton Initiative.

[00:16:15]It would keep sourcing Xinjiang cotton.

[00:16:17]The same day, its Hong Kong stock surged 17%.

[00:16:22]Li-Ning made a similar declaration.

[00:16:24]Within weeks, Li-Ning's online sales had jumped hundreds of percent as Chinese consumers who had bought Nike now looked for domestic alternatives. [music] A human rights controversy in one country had become a marketing advantage in another.

[00:16:38]The shoe companies did not create the politics, they read them. This is the phenomenon that Chinese consumer world calls Guochao, which translates roughly as national tide.

[00:16:49]It had been building for years before the Xinjiang moment, a shift among Chinese millennials and Gen Z consumers away from foreign prestige brands and toward domestic ones as a point of cultural pride.

[00:17:01]Anta and Li-Ning had been leaning into it, putting Chinese characters and traditional design elements into their products, repositioning from affordable to aspirational.

[00:17:12]The Xinjiang boycott was an accelerant poured onto something already burning.

[00:17:17]Domestic brands picked up 12 points of sneaker market share inside China over the following year. Anta passed Nike in China revenue in 2022 and has held the lead since.

[00:17:28]By 2024, >> [music] >> the China market share picture looked like this.

[00:17:33]Anta at 23%, Nike at just under 21, Li-Ning below 10, Adidas below 9.

[00:17:40]The brands that had spent 40 years building their mythologies on NBA courts and Jordan posters were now second in the world's largest sneaker market.

[00:17:50]And Anta, which had started as a shoe factory in Jinjiang, was now the world's third largest sportswear [music] company, behind only Nike and Adidas globally.

[00:18:00]Its 2025 revenue hit the equivalent of about $11 billion. That growth came from several engines. Anta's own brand, a China license for Fila that the company had bought for almost nothing in 2009, and built into a multi-billion-dollar premium business, and a portfolio of outdoor and lifestyle brands it had assembled over the years.

[00:18:22]The NBA deals were not the only reason Anta grew, but they were the credibility foundation that made everything else possible.

[00:18:30]While all of this was compounding quietly, the political fault line everyone had been stepping around cracked open. On October 4, 2019, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, Daryl Morey, posted an image on social media that read, "Fight for freedom.

[00:18:44]Stand with Hong Kong."

[00:18:47]He deleted it within hours. He was too late.

[00:18:50]Chinese state television, known as CCTV, suspended its NBA preseason broadcasts.

[00:18:56]Tencent, the NBA's exclusive Chinese digital partner, pulled preseason streaming.

[00:19:02]All 11 of the NBA's official Chinese corporate sponsors suspended their relationships, including Anta, which was one of them. The league issued a statement calling the tweet regrettable.

[00:19:12]NBA Commissioner Adam Silver issued a different statement saying the league would not censor its employees.

[00:19:18]China responded that the free speech statement showed strong dissatisfaction.

[00:19:23]Silver was then asked whether China had requested that Morey be fired. Silver said yes and told them, "There's no chance that's happening."

[00:19:32]The financial hit was real. At All-Star Weekend in February 2020, Silver put the losses at hundreds of millions of dollars, up to around $400 million, his words, "a ceiling, not a settled accounting."

[00:19:47]The more lasting damage was the 18-month CCTV blackout, which ran from October 2019 through March 2022 and left a whole generation of Chinese basketball fans watching the league through unofficial channels or not at all.

[00:20:03]Into that silence in the fall of 2021, a Boston Celtics center named Enes Kanter wore a pair of custom sneakers to a game.

[00:20:11]He had recently become a United States citizen and legally added Freedom as a surname. The shoes called out China's government by name. They depicted unflattering imagery of the NBA's most financially important relationship.

[00:20:25]China stopped streaming all Celtics games. LeBron James, when asked about Kanter Freedom's comments more broadly, said, "If you know me, you know I don't give too many people my energy."

[00:20:37]Kanter Freedom said publicly that NBA officials had asked him to remove the shoes, that the players union had pressured him, and that the league's China exposure had made him radioactive. He was traded from Boston in February 2022 and waived 4 days later by the Rockets. He has not played in the NBA since.

[00:20:57]His own account of what happened is clear. He believes his activism ended his career.

[00:21:02]Adam Silver denied that the league had blackballed him, said Kanter Freedom was completely within his right to speak out and called comparisons to Colin Kaepernick unfair.

[00:21:12]The basketball argument against Kanter is also real. He was averaging under four points and fewer than five rebounds a game in just under 12 minutes a night before the trade. A 30-year-old defensive liability in a system built around versatility.

[00:21:27]At that production level, plenty of players lose their roster spots with no political dimension whatsoever.

[00:21:34]Both things sit there unresolved. The court record says he was fading. The timing says something else.

[00:21:40]The viewer gets to decide where those two facts land. LeBron's case works differently. He made the either misinformed or not really educated comment about Morey on October 14th, 2019, 10 days after the tweet, on his first media availability after the Lakers returned from a preseason trip to China.

[00:21:59]The comment blew up immediately. Critics pointed to the fact that LeBron holds a lifetime Nike deal, reported at around $30 million a year, and potentially worth more than a billion dollars over its life.

[00:22:12]And that Nike's greater China business at the time was worth several billion dollars annually.

[00:22:17]The same company paying LeBron's biggest check was among the companies most directly exposed to the crisis Morey had triggered. The comment, the contract, and the timing [music] produced the appearance of a conflict. Critics seized on it. LeBron clarified and said he wasn't discussing the substance of Hong Kong.

[00:22:34]You can attribute the original comment to LeBron, note the financial context, and let the facts sit where they fall.

[00:22:42]What the Morey episode proved in economic terms was that the NBA's China relationship was not an abstraction. It was a real financial exposure worth hundreds of millions of dollars sitting inside a geopolitical relationship that could freeze it overnight with a single [music] tweet.

[00:22:58]The players wearing Chinese shoes were not in a separate universe from that exposure.

[00:23:03]They were connected to it, playing in a league whose China revenues subsidized everyone's checks while also carrying contracts with the brands whose market surged when those revenues got cut.

[00:23:15]Nobody resolved that. They just kept playing. After this CCTV blackout ended in March 2022, the NBA in China quietly returned to something resembling the previous arrangement. The deals kept coming. The endorsement roster grew.

[00:23:30]And then in November 2025, the most symbolic thing possible happened.

[00:23:36]Stephen Curry announced that his 13-year partnership with Under Armour was over.

[00:23:41]The man who had built the Curry brand inside an American company, who had made Under Armour's basketball division globally relevant and had the signature shoe line to show for it, was available.

[00:23:52]Every major brand came calling. Nike, Adidas, Reebok. Reporting afterward said at least one of them offered him more money than what he eventually signed. He chose Li-Ning anyway.

[00:24:04]On June 2nd, 2026, the 10-year deal was confirmed over $400 million, a number that places it among the largest shoe deals in the history of the sport. The terms go beyond money.

[00:24:16]Li-Ning now houses the Curry brand, the entire line he built at Under Armour, giving him the right to sign his own athletes under that umbrella.

[00:24:24]Li-Ning plans Curry brand retail stores in both China and the United States.

[00:24:29]Part of his decision, reporting says, came from testing the shoes of two Li-Ning athletes he knew, Dwyane Wade and Jimmy Butler.

[00:24:37]The guy who built his brand at an American company picked a Chinese one partly because the players he trusted were already there. Curry is not LeBron.

[00:24:45]He is the most universally liked player of his generation, a figure who crosses demographic lines in ways almost no one else manages.

[00:24:54]His China fan base is enormous. His signing is not just a business story. It is the story of the entire shift arriving at its logical endpoint.

[00:25:03]When Damon Jones wore Li-Ning shoes in a Cleveland practice facility in 2005, the company's American dream was a bench player with statues in a country he'd never visited.

[00:25:14]20 years later, the same company signs the man who reinvented how basketball is played.

[00:25:20]Meanwhile, the company that started the whole thing on a train to Beijing had been building something else entirely.

[00:25:26]In 2009, Anta had bought the China, Hong Kong, and Macau license rights to Fila from a local distributor for the equivalent of less than $50 million.

[00:25:37]Fila had 50 stores in China and was losing money. By 2021, Fila China was generating the equivalent of nearly $3 billion a year and was responsible for more than half of Anta's gross profit.

[00:25:50]In 2018 and 2019, Anta led a consortium that acquired an outdoor sports conglomerate called Amer Sports, [music] the company that owns Arc'teryx, Salomon, and Wilson, among others, for the equivalent of around $5 billion.

[00:26:04]Amer Sports went public in New York in 2024.

[00:26:07]Arc'teryx's China revenue alone hit the equivalent of nearly $1.5 billion that year, up 54%.

[00:26:15]The company that once sold 600 pairs of shoes door-to-door in Beijing now owned a piece of the global premium outdoor market. In January 2026, Anta announced it had agreed to buy approximately 29% of Puma, the German sportswear brand, from its French ownership group.

[00:26:33]The price was the equivalent of nearly $2 billion.

[00:26:36]The deal would make Anta Puma's largest single shareholder.

[00:26:41]Anta said it had no plans for a full takeover, [music] but it would seek board seats.

[00:26:45]There is a small detail that lands differently the longer you think about it. Puma is the brand that signed Vince Carter, a chapter we have told on this channel. And for decades it was a symbol of exactly the kind of American sneaker credibility that Chinese brands spent 20 years trying to buy. The company that once put statues of a Cleveland journeyman in its windows now owns the biggest stake in one of the German brands it once envied from the other side of the Pacific.

[00:27:13]Ding Shizhong has said publicly that he does not want Anta to be the Nike of China. He wants Anta to be the Anta of the world.

[00:27:23]The world's third largest sportswear company with the Curry brand in its portfolio and a board seat at Puma on the way is not done proving the point.

[00:27:32]Here is what the whole arc adds up to when you step back far enough to see it.

[00:27:37]The American shoe industry spent decades building a system where the athlete was always the product. The player wore the logo, cashed the check, [music] and when the contract ended, the brand kept the shoe.

[00:27:48]The credibility, the thing that made the shoe worth buying, came from the player's fame.

[00:27:54]But the brand kept the upside.

[00:27:56]That system worked magnificently for Nike and Jordan brand and every brand that copied the model because the players had no leverage to demand anything else. Chinese brands looked at that system and decided they could disrupt it the same way Ding Shizhong disrupted door-to-door selling by showing up with something the competition had never offered. Not more money necessarily, ownership, a lifetime deal, a sub-brand with your name on the door.

[00:28:22]The players who took those deals didn't just take a check. They took a position inside a company chasing the world's largest sneaker market. They became partners, not endorsers. What the players mostly didn't see at the time, and maybe still haven't, is who the real protagonist was.

[00:28:39]Ding Shizhong didn't build a global empire because of the shoes. He built it because he understood, at 17 on a train with 600 pairs of someone else's product, the credibility cannot be manufactured. It can only be transferred. He bought a table tennis champion's fame to make Anta real, then spent the next 25 years transferring credibility up the ladder, from Kong Linghui to Kevin Garnett to Klay Thompson to Kyrie Irving. Each name making the next one easier to sign.

[00:29:12]His rivals at Li-Ning ran the exact same play with Dwyane Wade and eventually with Stephen Curry. Different company, identical idea. The players thought they were the ones getting ownership. The deeper truth is that the brands were the ones acquiring it, buying back one superstar at a time, the four decades of credibility that Nike and Adidas had spent generations building.

[00:29:34]The players got their names on the door, but the Chinese companies got the building.

[00:29:39]Nike spent 40 years building a mythology around the idea that the shoe was about the man. China just spent 20 years proving the man was always about the market.