This year has been a strange one for NBA sneaker deals. New Balance hired a $1 million intern, Los Angeles Laker Kyle Kuzma signed with a sneaker reselling app, Puma gave all its new signees access to a private jet, and Converse relaunched its basketball program with Washington Wizard Kelly Oubre Jr. but he's not wearing the brand on the court. And then there's Nets guard Spencer Dinwiddie, who put up 18 points and 4 assists against Cleveland this week...while wearing a pair of shoes celebrating early '90s anime series Yu Yu Hakusho.

Dinwiddie is a quarter of the way through a project that will span all 82 games of the NBA season. He plans to wear a different shoe, made in collaboration with sneaker customizer Kickasso, every night. During away games he pays tribute to the city he's in—he wore shoes honoring Rosa Parks during the Nets home opener in Detroit, where the civil rights activist lived for most of her life. He uses most of these opportunities to spotlight black icons: so far this season he's put Parks, Langston Hughes, Jesse Owens, Nelson Mandela, Harriet Tubman, Colin Kaepernick, Frederick Douglass, and Muhammad Ali on shoes.

Home games are for him. "A lot of [the home game shoes] are going to be a tour through my mind," he tells me at the Brooklyn Nets' training facility in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Those Yu Yu Hakusho characters, for example, that gritted their teeth on the side of Dinwiddie's shoes were a callback to his childhood, when he would watch anime with his brother.

"For Bruce Lee, there's a serenity that he carried," Dinwiddie says of these Lee-themed shoes he wore in a game against Dallas. "That peace, in how your mind works, was always really powerful for me growing up." Dinwiddie and Kickasso designed these shoes for Miami Heat legend Dwyane Wade's last season. When they played each other, "[Wade] was telling me how proud he is of how far I've come, and he really appreciated the tribute," Dinwiddie says. "That was really cool."

The artwork doesn't cover generic Adidas or Nike sneakers, either. Many players across sports will customize by airbrushing. Kickasso, Dinwiddie's partner on the shoes, has created Grinch cleats for NFL star Odell Beckham Jr.; other NBA players have worn sneakers done up with images of Friday the 13th villain Jason Voorhees, The Joker, and Homer from The Simpsons. All of these are done on pre-existing Nike and Adidas shoes. Dinwiddie, though, through a partnership with an organization called Project Dream, does something almost unheard of in the NBA: he produces his own shoes.

When Dinwiddie came into the league and played for the Detroit Pistons he wore Nikes. But after two seasons he was traded to Chicago, swiftly cut by the Bulls, spent some time in the NBA's version of the minors, the G League, and then was eventually picked up by Brooklyn. At that point he says, "no really big company wanted to sign me."

So, in 2016, he started making his own sneakers under the brand name K8iros (pronounced Kyros). But to hear Dinwiddie tell it, the project really started almost two decades ago. Dinwiddie says he was eight when he first started sketching out his own shoes. "I drew them and wrote descriptions for them. I was so serious," he says. In the descriptions, he'd write out all the tech that was used in the shoe. If one had Nike Air cushioning, he'd point to it and then write out why it was important and revolutionary. "It was like my Iron Man armor," he says.

Dinwiddie finally got a chance to bring these drawings to life after he joined the Nets. In 2016, he visited China with then-teammate Jeremy Lin. He played in Lin's celebrity game, went on the country's hit show Dunk of China, and then visited factories in China to see where his shoes would be made.