“I fell in love with it,” VanVleet said. “I was trying a bunch of other shoes, and it stacked up pretty good to almost everything that I was wearing at the time, so it kind of made my decision a little bit easier.” It helped, too, that AND1 was aggressive in recruiting him. To AND1, VanVleet was everything the brand had once been and could become again: An underdog who wasn’t supposed to make it but did, never once losing its roots.