Basketball

Adidas has been a longtime basketball shoe manufacturer and is one of the leading basketball brands in the world. They are most famous for their late 1960s iconic Superstar and Pro Model shoes, affectionately known as "shelltoes" for their stylized hard rubber toe box.^{[citation needed]} Fueled by, among others, coaches such as UCLA's John Wooden, Adidas drew about even with Converse in basketball by the mid 1970s before both started to fall behind then-upstart Nike in the early 1980s.^[38] Subsequently Adidas Superstar became very popular in the 1980s hip hop streetwear scene alongside Adidas's stripe-sided polyester suits.
Adidas is also the current outfitter of all 30 franchises in the National Basketball Association (replacing the Reebok brand after the merger) and sponsors numerous players past and present like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Tracy McGrady, as well as Marcus Clark Dwight Howard, Chauncey Billups, Derrick Rose, Quincy Pondexter, Brandon Knight, Eric Gordon, Michael Beasley, Josh Smith, Damian Lillard, Jrue Holiday, Tim Duncan, Jeremy Lin, Iman Shumpert, Jorwin George and John Wall. Adidas endorsed Kobe Bryant with the Adidas Equipment KB8 as his first signature shoe until July 2002.The company also endorsed Kevin Garnett until he opted out of his contract in 2010 Gilbert Arenas was an Adidas endorser until 2010