In a league where shoes change almost as often as lineups, Jarrett Allen has spent nearly a decade doing the opposite.
The Cleveland Cavaliers center has built one of the NBA’s strangest and most charming sneaker habits by wearing the same model – the Nike Kyrie 3 TB Black White – throughout his entire career. Now, after 620 NBA games, that streak may finally be nearing its end.
Allen told The Athletic:
“I’m on my last pair. As I find them online, I buy them as soon as I can, but I haven’t found a new pair in the last 1 1/2 years. So, the run might be over.”
The detail makes the story even better because it turns what once felt like a quirky preference into something closer to a disappearing act. The Kyrie 3 debuted in 2016, one year before Allen entered the league as a rookie in 2017, and the specific black-and-white version he loves has not been re-released.
That is what has always made Allen such an outlier. This was never literally one immortal pair of shoes surviving since Brooklyn drafted him. Even earlier this year, Allen himself made clear he had rotated through multiple pairs over time.
DID YOU KNOW?
Jarrett Allen’s been playing in the same pair of Nike Kyrie 3s since his rookie season in 2017 😳 pic.twitter.com/SEknFa1olB
— B/R Kicks (@brkicks) February 5, 2026
But the loyalty to the model never changed, and that consistency now looks almost absurd in the context of modern NBA sneaker culture, where some players treat footwear like a nightly accessory change.
According to the same report, most NBA players go through roughly 10 pairs in a season, while others can burn through 50 or 60 or more. Cade Cunningham and Josh Giddey, for example, each told The Athletic they wear around 60 pairs in a season.
Allen lives in the opposite universe. He is not chasing new colorways, flexing rare player exclusives or treating the tunnel like a sneaker showroom. He is a size 17 center trying to prolong the life of an old favorite. In fact, he practices in other models, including Kyrie 8s, just to preserve the black-and-white Kyrie 3s for games.
