The Record · Graded · 9 August 2026
Eighteen calls, made in public before the hammer and archived the day they went up. The sale closed 8 August. Seven hit. Eleven missed. Here's every one, and what the misses are trying to tell us.
Graded against realized hammer price; Goldin adds a 22% buyer's premium on top. A call is a hit if the lot closed inside its stated band, a miss if it closed outside it — over or under. No partial credit.
Calls
18
Published before close
Hits
7
Closed inside the band
Misses
11
Nine over, two under
Hit rate
39%
Chapter one
The headline number is the least interesting thing on this page. The misses weren't random — they fell into two repeatable patterns. In this work, a structured miss is the product: it points straight at an edge.
Four pairs called in the $4–8K range closed at $14.7K, $15K, $16.1K and $24K — two to three times over. Four for four, across LeBron and Curry. The whole low-and-mid game-used sneaker tier reprices well above where we're calling it. The tier repriced. Nobody sent the people calling it a memo — us included.
The provenance lots came in under call — a 2016 Finals Game 1 pair, a 51-point night, an MVP-season pair, all below their bands. A documented moment is a great story and a soft premium. That is not what the hobby assumes, and it's where we paid up on paper and the room didn't.
| Lot | Item | Class | Called (hammer) | Sold (hammer) | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 21 | LeBron James photo-matched Cleveland jersey (Jan 2017) | blind | $55–85K | $75,000 | HIT |
| 22 | Stephen Curry photo-matched Golden State jersey | blind | $30–48K | $30,031 | HIT |
| 23 | Jalen Brunson NBA Cup Championship jersey | blind | $70–110K | $76,900 | HIT |
| 24 | Patrick Ewing signed Knicks jersey | blind | $14–22K | $17,000 | HIT |
| 84 | LeBron James Zoom III, matched — 47 points (2006) | late | $17–27K | $20,000 | HIT |
| 86 | LeBron 10 promo sample #1/1, matched & signed | late | $44–65K | $51,000 | HIT |
| 90 | Michael Jordan Air Jordan XI “Space Jam”, twice-signed | blind | $14–22K | $15,500 | HIT |
| 1 | Michael Jordan game-used, matched, twice-signed (Dec 1995) | blind | $70–95K | $142,000 | MISS ↑ over |
| 17 | Michael Jordan final-season Wizards jersey, matched | revised | $45–70K | $150,000 | MISS ↑ over |
| 52 | Nikola Jokić photo-matched jersey — 35 & 13 | late | $8–14K | $16,250 | MISS ↑ over |
| 88 | LeBron James XIX game-used sneakers, matched | blind | $4–7.5K | $14,750 | MISS ↑ over |
| 89 | LeBron James XVI game-used sneakers, matched | blind | $4–7.5K | $15,000 | MISS ↑ over |
| 91 | Stephen Curry game-used sneakers, matched (Nov 2014) | blind | $4–7K | $16,100 | MISS ↑ over |
| 92 | Stephen Curry game-used sneakers, matched (Feb 2016) | blind | $4.5–8K | $24,001 | MISS ↑ over |
| 2 | Curry 2016 Finals Game 1 sneakers, matched & signed | late | $46–68K | $28,500 | MISS ↓ under |
| 85 | LeBron James matched, signed sneakers (Nov 2012) | blind | $28–42K | $20,000 | MISS ↓ under |
| 87 | Curry 51-point game-used sneakers, twice-signed | late | $22–34K | $16,500 | MISS ↓ under |
| 480 | Curry 2014-15 MVP-season sneakers, twice-signed | late | $6–12K | $5,500 | MISS ↓ under |
Prices are hammer; add 22% for all-in. Bands and this grading are archived at the Internet Archive.
Calls were published before each lot closed. Blind calls were set with no live bidding visible; late calls were made with the board in view, and they're a deliberately weaker class — ten days of bidding tells you a lot a cold call doesn't. Lot 17 is graded against the revised band, a documented self-correction; the original call would also have missed, the other way.
Eighteen calls is a small sample, and these were mostly blind — no comp model behind them. That's the point, not an excuse. A model built in a vacuum tells you what you already believe. A model built on your own graded misses tells you where you're wrong and hands you the fix. The two patterns above are hypotheses to test at the next sale, not laws. The next scorecard is where they're proven or broken — in public, same as this one.
We just captured all 563 sold lots from this sale. The tier we kept underpricing is sitting in the data now, in plain sight.