I'm gonna disagree here heavily. Kicks are supposed to be comfortable to the player. Demar wears his shoes loose, KD wears 1 full size bigger, Jason Terry wore a few sizes up and attempted to compensate that with layering multiple pairs of socks. Funny enough the players mentioned also hardly have (or had) any serious ankle injuries. Sure tape is used but tape can only do so much.. plenty of players getting injured with or without ankle tape anyways regardless of their footwear of choice.
For me personally, snug shoes have caused a tailors bunion to form. From my research and speaking with doctors, the #1 cause is tight footwear and here we are almost 20 years later of wearing "snug" shoes for basketball as I have been told all my life. I now have to wear 1/2 to full size bigger to compensate for the width as I went from a narrow/medium foot to a wide as my old size causes extreme discomfort and numbness.
So no, basketball shoes are not necessarily meant to be snug. As outlined in the first paragraph, you can clearly get performance out of shoes that are bigger or loose fitting.. and those players aren't the only ones doing those things, they're the only ones I can think of off the top of my head right now.
You do you though, I ain't listening to that "they're supposed to be snug" crap anymore as I have been for 20 years and it's obviously caused issues.. I don't want my feet to look like lebrons before my 40th birthday (yes, tight footwear has contributed to his deformed feet).
