ÿþFollowing up on yesterday s debut, we see the nike air force 1 flyknit next entrant in Nike Basketball s  20 Years retrospective pick up right where the Air Force 180 Low left off. That model commonly linked to Charles Barkley could be seen as the first step in Nike embracing the  90s attitude, and here we see more evidence of Tinker Hatfield s impeccable timing. Hatfield and assistant Eric Avar saw basketball shorts getting longer, and following the 1980s arms race that had court kicks higher and heavier than ever before, it was simply time for a change.

After a fairly thorough excavation of the legendary 1995-96 season and its immediate followups, Nike Basketball continues its journey through the past two decades of excellence with the spiritual successor to yesterday s entrant.  97 nike presto fly s Air Foamposite One set the bar with a then-record $170 MSRP and a design that remains  futuristic to this day, and two years later, Foamposite lead designer Eric Avar leveraged the technology to  create a seamless extension of your nike roshe two flyknit body.

In fact, the Air Foamposite One was a Penny 2.5 of sorts, heavily influencing the III and taking cues from the wavy-lined predecessors, and the recent rise in all things Penny has seen these rise to the top as (along with the Pro edition) arguably the most collectible model released over the past three or so years. Click through to see more classic photos and promo materials as well as some insights from designer Eric Avar and stick with Sneaker News as we continue to examine nike flyknit racer multicolor the greatest Nike Basketball designs of all-time.

The Nike Air Foamposite One is a shoe that opened minds and assisted a generation of players. What many don t know is that it was inspired by sunglass protection. Uniting the Advanced group, then known as A.P.E. (Advanced Product Engineering), marketing and the designers at Nike, lead designer Eric Avar recalls the question,  Okay, what could we do? How do we step outside of the norm of the way we look at design and manufacturing shoes?

Once the Nike Flywire proved its mettle in testing, Avar and the team s approach was to create a design that allowed most of the shoe to fall away into the background in order to make the Flywire in the midfoot the focal point. Another new Nike innovation, Nike Lunarlon, would also make its first appearance in a basketball shoe as a key performance element of a design that borrowed elements from a shoe that, at the time, nike chukka was only the stuff of legend, the Nike Mag.

As we ve looked back through some of the most influential Nike Basketball designs over the past twenty years, significant attention has been paid to the progression of certain designers and how they ve captured an athlete s personality or the zeitgeist of the time. This next entrant represents the culmination of all of these forces and a transition into a newly evolved world as for the first time in 2006, Nike Air completely takes over the sole for a more durable and dependable cushioning solution than with a traditional foam midsole.