PHOTO: Metta World Peace wasn't kidding, played with stuffed pandas in his shoes on Friday

In mid-September, The Pandas Friend née Metta World Peace née Ron Artest unveiled a new shoe that had a stuffed panda bear worked into the design.

On Friday, World Peace (the name change hasn't officially gone through yet) made his preseason debut with the Sichuan Blue Whales of the Chinese Basketball Association. He was wearing the shoes, complete with a panda head sticking out of where a standard tongue would go.

It was originally thought that World Peace would detach the head before games and throw it into the crowd. Wrong. This is much, much cooler:

This is a professional basketball player, playing in shoes that have a stuffed panda head on them. Can't make this up. And why would anyone? It's crazy.

According to World Peace, he nailed four triples in just six minutes, but game statistics were not immediately available. If those numbers are accurate, World Peace may have just discovered the next great step forward in basketball analytics. Heck, suit us up in a full mascot uniform if it gets us numbers like that.

For what it's worth, as unique as World Peace is, this may not be an entirely novel idea, as designer Jeremy Scott had an adidas-branded pair of panda shoes released in 2011.