Nike retaliated by filing a $10 million lawsuit alleging breach of contract, along with a host of other charges, including civil conspiracy. Central to the complaint was the contention that the three designers were providing Adidas with trade secrets. Nike alleged that Dekovic had copied the contents of his corporate laptop before departing and sent himself a file of confidential design documents.

“After examining 27 electronic devices and after the designers produced over 69,113 pages of information in discovery, Nike still has no evidence of any actionable misappropriation of trade secrets,” an attorney for the designers wrote in a motion in April. Two months later, Nike and the designers agreed to settle the suit for undisclosed terms.

Adidas put the three designers on the payroll shortly thereafter, setting them up smack in the middle of the world's preeminent streetwear scene.

If Beaverton is big and glistening and heavily fortified, Adidas's U.S. headquarters a few miles downriver in Portland proper, in a much smaller steel-and-glass cluster near an old shipping yard, feel downright homey. The only security is a tired woman with gray hair, who encourages me to write my name in Sharpie on a white sticker.

Paul Gaudio, Adidas's global design director, works out of an office on the east side of the building. A veteran Adidas man—he has spent 20 years at the company, with only a brief interlude at Norton Motorcycles—Gaudio has tight-cropped silver hair and hooded slate-blue eyes. The day we meet, he is wearing a black T-shirt, straight-leg jeans, and a pair of battered leather boots. His wife's initials are tattooed across his knuckles.

On the table before us is a pair of Yeezy 750s. The shoe, he suggests, with its $350 price tag and limited-edition cache, isn't so different in function from, say, an $845K Porsche 918 Spyder—an all-but-unobtainable product that lifts the profile of the brand as a whole. “There's a halo that comes off it,” he tells me, picking up one of the shoes, “and you hope it casts light on everything else you do. It's a statement piece, right? You pull some of what's so interesting about it into the broader offerings.”

“I have all the respect in the world for a competitor like Nike, but they don’t intimidate us in any manner, because they’re heavy they’re big, they’re oversaturated in the market, and I think people are looking for a change.”

Behind him is an array of shoe sketches that I promise Adidas I will under no circumstances disclose, but suffice it to say that many of them are beautiful and strange, like talons, or the type of sharpened spaceship that might come shrieking out the ass of a Death Star. The sketches, cooked up by a crew of young designers, typify the provocative work Gaudio wants to see come out of the Brooklyn satellite office. “We can reward young talents by letting them rotate through locations like that,” he says.

Gaudio estimates at least a couple of dozen employees will work in the Brooklyn space, which he says will have its own social-media center and consumer researchers. The leash will be intentionally long, he adds, the creatives encouraged to play with concepts that might've never been entertained under the old Adidas—or at Nike.

The executive who allegedly helped persuade Nike's troika to flee for Adidas is Brian Foresta, the vice president of design for basketball, a sport where Adidas has an especially steep uphill climb. Foresta (who also used to work for Nike) is 41 but could pass for two decades younger: He wears his dark hair lacquered straight across his head and his beard long but trimmed. His office is a carpeted and densely curated lair, like a room-sized mood board. There are pictures of A$AP Rocky and Biggie Smalls, swatches and splashes of color pinned to tackboards, a luxurious white couch with a plush rainbow-colored Adidas pillow.

“When brands take big swings, it's like a sugar rush—it's a spike, and then it kind of tails off,” Foresta tells me. “I've seen us do that in the past, and that's not what we want to do.” Instead, he says, he's determined to double down on projects like the Crazylight Boost—a sneaker line debuted at All-Star Weekend by Timberwolves small forward Andrew Wiggins, the 20-year-old NBA Rookie of the Year—and continue to invest heavily in up-and-coming talent.