Nets’ partnership with Drink Barcode comes with Kyle Kuzma, Knicks twists

The Nets have an official new fitness beverage — and the irony is it’s founded by an ex-Director of Performance for the Knicks and NBA champion with the Lakers.

Brooklyn struck a three-year deal with Drink Barcode, which beat out industry giant Gatorade.

CEO and founder Mubarak Malik spent eight years in the Garden keeping the Knicks healthy, and Kyle Kuzma won a title while drinking it.

“I’m very excited for an organization of first class like the Brooklyn Nets to carry us. It’s big,” Kuzma said. “They care about their players’ health and clearly (it shows) by making a move like that.”

While Barcode supplies the Patriots, Browns and others, the Nets are the first official sports drink partnership they have with any NBA team.

“It wasn’t like we were soliciting a bunch of different teams. The Nets branding just from the bottle (in) black-and-white, it’s New York City. I felt like they do a lot more grassroots initiatives with the kids. So it made sense,” Malik said. “The Nets are the first one we officially decided to partner with because of the synergy and the brand and what they were doing with inside their operations team.”

Malik’s time with the Knicks taught him that there was a gaping hole in the market.

He developed Barcode while with the team and gave it to the players, but quit in 2020 during COVID.

He met Kuzma and shipped him samples as a pitch.

The latter was drinking them en route to winning a title in the Bubble, and promptly invested as a co-founder.

Barcode bills itself as the first plant-based performance drink with things like vitamins D, B12, B6, magnesium, and adaptogens like rhodiola and cordyceps.

“You get to really care about what you put in your body, because my body is like a Ferrari, right? Being an elite class athlete, you want to put the best fuel into it,” said Kuzma. “So naturally, Barcode those things go hand-in-hand with me because certain things that I need are within Barcode. When we’re thinking about our vitamins, vitamins are essential. Vitamin D, there’s millions and millions and millions of people that are vitamin D deficient: You need that.

“Then if you go into a lot of different mushrooms, they promote good health, good, digestive, just natural flow throughout your body, mental clarity. Those are all things that I need in my body to wake up every single day. When you think about adaptogens for recovery, magnesium for sleep, and relaxation of muscles, these are all things that correlate to success in my career.”