Sale report · graded 6 July 2026
Sotheby's declined to estimate a single one of these. So I did. Six calls, five graded, and one of them wasn't close.
Sotheby's published no estimates on any marquee Finals lot, which is unusual and worth noting. Every number below is mine.
Called $120,000–300,000. Sold for over a million. Not a near miss — 3.4× my ceiling.
The one I got right, and the band was wide enough to be honest about how little I knew.
Called it as a role-player Finals jersey. It sold like a star's.
I said $5,000–30,000 and admitted at the time the data was thin. It went for a quarter of a million.
The OG tip-in ball — the headline lot, the reason most people were watching — was pulled from the auction at the last minute. My call was $400,000–700,000, on screen at $450,000, against Darren Rovell's public $3 million. It never got tested. No result, no grade, and I'm not claiming one.
Two hits from five, and every single miss was low. Median error, 71% under.
I had built these numbers off weekly-sale comps — LeBron's birthday jersey at $83,000, Anunoby's own weekly jersey at $16,640 — and then adjusted upward for the Finals. The adjustment wasn't nearly big enough. A championship changes the category, not the multiple.
The court panel is the clearest lesson. I called it $5,000–30,000 because I had no comps at all and said so. Fine. But two panels sold that night: the one reading FIN made $243,000, and the one reading ALS made $115,200. Same floor, same game, cut into pieces — and one fragment was worth more than twice the other.
That's not supply competing with itself. That's the market pricing which piece of the word you get. I hadn't considered that a thing like that could matter. It matters.