KICKS 5: Illunatics

Let’s recap what we’ve seen so far. KG was on the cover of KICKS 1; that’s held up well over time. Iverson was on KICKS 2; that was and is a perfect score. Both KICKS 3 and 4 were covered by Kobe Bryant; so that was money. Looking back, yeah, we batted 1000 over the first four versions of KICKS. And then KICKS 5 came along and ruined that. Don’t get me wrong, the Jordan XVIII’s were  hot. The issue with this issue is the two dudes on  the cover: Quentin Richardson and Darius Miles. Let’s take Darius, who was (and still is) a personal favorite of mine. DMiles was up-and-coming when this issue came out in ‘02, but he didn’t deserve to be on the cover of a magazine. His on-court accomplishments didn’t  come close to the hype he was receiving. Same goes for QRich. Both were so good and so young, we couldn’t help but jump the gun a little bit. And we got shot. Usually for KICKS (and SLAM), placing the newest, youngest dude on th...