We've chronicled Nike Basketball's nike 95s trip back through the past twenty years over these past couple weeks and today we encounter the design that's made more of an impact on the last few years than any other on the list. The Nike Air Foamposite One debuted in 1997 after a product meeting with Penny Hardaway left the star of the Air Max Penny 1 and II with absolute certainty that "This [was his] next shoe!" In fact, the Air Foamposite One was a Penny 2.5 of sorts, heavily influencing the III and taking cues from the wavy-lined predecessors.

The Foamposite now needed its athlete. "We had it and we'd been working with it for some time and were, quite honestly, a little undecided on what to do nike 97 with it," recalled Avar. On meeting Penny Hardaway to discuss the Nike Air Penny III, Avar brought along an early Foamposite sample. "I wasn't sure I was even going to show that sample to him. We had other ideas we nike 97s were presenting. But he leaned over, looked into the bag and said,  What is that?' He reached in, grabbed it and he says,  This is my next shoe!' I was like,  Okay! There's the go-to-market strategy!'"

Nike Flywire gave the notion of "Flight" some extra might. The Nike Air Hyperdunk went over the head of its opponents by borrowing a concept from one of the modern world's most impressive architectural feats  suspension bridges. By applying super-strong nylon filaments for nike af1 precise support akin to the cables of a bridge, the Nike Air Hyperdunk was able to radically reduce weight by providing support material only where it's needed.

Once the Nike Flywire proved its mettle in testing, Avar and the team's approach was to create a design that allowed most of the shoe to fall away into the background in order to make the Flywire in the midfoot the focal point. Another new Nike innovation, Nike Lunarlon, would also make its first appearance in a basketball shoe as a key performance element of a design that borrowed elements from a shoe that, at the time, was only the stuff of legend, the Nike Mag.

The Nike Air Hyperflight was a response to the question with which Bowerman met Avar in product meetings over the years: "Can you make it lighter?" Click through to see the sketches that show the transition from the nike air force 1 black rocket-infused BB4 into a new era of synthetics and bold colorways and stick with Sneaker News for the second half of this series next week.

The Nike Air Max 360 Basketball changed the game for explosive players and moved us toward models like LeBrons 7 and 8 with a completely uncaged cushion, and you can see plenty of sketches and early photos after the jump below. We're getting close to our current point in history, so stick with Sneaker News for the last few days of this feature and let us know which is your favorite Nike Basketball design of all time.