Is the market actually moving?

Every market has a version of this question, and the modern basketball card market is no exception: is what's happening right now real, or is it just the same hype cycle wearing a new outfit? We've spent the past several months trying to answer that honestly, by looking at how cards have actually traded — not just where prices landed, but how much conviction was behind them. Here's what we found.

To do that, we pulled the weekly trading data — price, how often each card sold, how much money changed hands — for every card in our set, going back as far as each one has a real trading history. Then we lined that up, card by card and week by week, against what was actually happening in each player's career. The rest of this piece is what that comparison shows.

The ten cards behind this piece

Before getting into what the market's been doing, it helps to know exactly who we're talking about. We built a working list of ten cards, all tied to current or recent NBA stars, that we use as a consistent lens on the modern era — based on accolades, card-market size, and how often each card actually trades. Here's the full breakdown of how and why we picked these ten, including who just missed the cut. For now, here's the list itself, since the rest of this piece leans on it constantly.

Each represented by their flagship rookie card, base version only — no inserts, parallels, or numbered variants. That's the working set behind everything in this piece, and everything we'll publish going forward.

The boom nobody questioned at the time

Start at the beginning. Through 2020 and into 2021, modern basketball cards went through the same thing a lot of collectible categories did during that stretch: a sudden, sharp run-up in attention and price, driven by a mix of real enthusiasm and a lot of money looking for somewhere to go. Nobody needed convincing that cards were "back." For a while, the cards weren't even the point — the trajectory was.

That run peaked late in 2021. Looking at the weekly data across every card in our set, almost all of them were trading at or near their high point around the same time, regardless of who the player was or what kind of season they were having. That's usually a tell. When everything moves together, it's rarely about any one thing happening on the court.

The unwind

What followed wasn't a single crash day — there's no headline anyone could point to. It was a long, grinding decline through 2022. Prices gave back the better part of what they'd gained, steadily, month over month, with no real bounce to interrupt it. By the time 2022 ended, most of the boom-era gains were gone.

What's striking, going back through the weekly trading data, is how indiscriminate that decline was. We checked every card's week-by-week numbers against what its player had actually done at the time, looking for some hint that the crash spared the proven guys and punished the speculative ones. It didn't. Kevin Durant already had two championships and two Finals MVPs to his name when the bubble popped — his card's weekly data shows it falling about as hard as any in the set, harder than most. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander had nothing — no All-Star nod, no All-NBA selection, no case for anyone to make — and his weekly numbers held up better than almost everyone else's. There's no "the proven guys held their value" story in this data. If anything, it runs the other way.

This is the part of the story most people remember, if they remember any of it: card prices went way up, then they came back down, and it didn't seem to matter who you were. That's about as clean a signature of a hype bubble deflating as you'll find — air coming out of everything at once, because the air was never tied to who'd actually earned it. What came next is where most retellings of this story get it wrong.

The false bottom

The conventional version of this story says the market bottomed out in 2023 and started recovering from there. We went looking for that bottom in the weekly trading data, and it isn't where the story says it should be.

2023 did have a real bounce in it — prices climbed for a few months in a way that looked, in the moment, like the start of a recovery. But it didn't hold. By the back half of the year, the market was fading again, and it kept fading through most of 2024. The genuine low point — the actual bottom of this whole cycle — came over a year after the point most people would call "the bottom," deep into the back half of 2024.

That timing matters for a specific reason: 2024 was also when a hot new rookie card joined the basket we track, and its debut produced an immediate, visible spike in activity. For a moment, that spike could have looked like proof the market had turned a corner. It hadn't. The broader market kept sliding for months afterward, and the rookie-card spike turned out to be a single loud event sitting on top of a market that was still quietly getting worse. If you'd called the bottom right then, you'd have been early by the better part of a year.

We think that's the more honest lesson here, more than any specific date: a single card going viral can make a flat or falling market look like it's turning, when it isn't. That's exactly the kind of signal worth being skeptical of — and exactly the kind of thing a hype-driven hobby press has every incentive to call a turn before it actually is one.

The turn, when it actually came

The real recovery starts in early 2025. Rather than just look at where prices went from there, we compared how trading itself behaved across all three moments in this story — the original boom, the 2024 bottom, and now — because that comparison turned out to be the clearest evidence in the whole piece.

During the original 2021 boom, prices hit their highest point ever, but the actual pace of trading behind those prices was, by comparison, fairly thin. A relatively modest amount of buying and selling was enough to set sky-high prices that everyone in the hobby was watching. That's a familiar signature of a market running ahead of its own depth — price moving harder than the trading behind it can really support.

At the bottom, we expected the opposite of the boom: a dead, abandoned market. That's not quite what the data shows. Cards kept changing hands about as often as they had during the boom — if anything, slightly more often. What collapsed was the price people were willing to pay, not the willingness to trade at all. The market didn't go quiet during the worst of it. It got honest.

Now, for the first time across all three moments, price and trading pace are climbing together — and trading pace has grown even faster than price has. That's the one signature that's hard to fake. It isn't a handful of headline sales dragging an average upward; it's more cards changing hands, more often, at higher prices, all at the same time.

So: is it real? By that measure, yes — and more convincingly than at either of the other two moments in this story. This isn't a price line floating up on thin air. There's broader, more frequent trading behind it than we can find at any other point in the data, including the original boom everyone remembers as a frenzy.

But it isn't everything, and that's the more interesting part

Here's where the story gets more specific, and more useful, than "the market recovered." We checked each card we track against its own high point from the original 2021 boom. Most of them are still well below that old peak — some by a wide margin. The broad recovery story doesn't hold up card by card.

Three cards are the exception. Stephen Curry, Nikola Jokić, and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander are all trading at or above their 2021 highs right now. That's not a coincidence, and it's not one story — it's three different stories that happen to land in the same place.

The player who hadn't done anything yet

In 2021, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was a promising young guard on a rebuilding team, with no All-Star appearances, no All-NBA selections, nothing on the résumé that would have justified speculative interest in his card. The hype boom had nothing to hype. When we lined his weekly trading data up against his actual career timeline, everything that makes his card relevant today — the All-NBA runs, back-to-back MVPs, a championship and Finals MVP — happened entirely after the original boom had already gone bust. There was no way 2021-era enthusiasm could have priced this in, because none of it existed yet.

The player who was just getting started

Nikola Jokić was already a known quantity by 2021 — an All-Star, a first-team All-NBA player — but the thing that actually defines his career now mostly happened afterward. His first two MVPs landed right as the original boom was peaking and turning over, which is a coincidence of timing more than cause and effect. But the Finals MVP, the championship, the third MVP — all of that came during the years the hobby had already written off as dead. Mapped against the weekly data, his card's current strength isn't a hype hangover. It's caught up to a résumé that kept growing well after everyone stopped paying attention.

The player whose biggest moment got ignored

Stephen Curry is the inverse case. He didn't need 2021 to make him relevant — he already had multiple championships and MVPs by then. What's notable is when his actual career-capping achievement landed: his fourth championship and his first-ever Finals MVP came in the summer of 2022, right in the middle of the broader unwind, while the market was still falling. His weekly trading data from that stretch shows the achievement didn't stop the slide at the time. It's part of why the card holds up now — not because of new hype, but because a genuinely major moment got buried under a market that was busy crashing for unrelated reasons, and the market has since caught up to it.

Not every name fits this pattern cleanly, and we'd rather flag that than smooth it over. Luka Dončić is playing some of the best basketball of his career right now, by most measures — and when we pulled his card's weekly data, it's barely moved in months. The most likely explanation is a shocking, still-unresolved trade and a championship résumé that's still missing its capstone, but it's a real gap in an otherwise tidy story, not a footnote.

Three different reasons, one shared result, and one honest exception: in every case we could explain, what's driving the card is something that happened on the court, not a return of the old enthusiasm. None of these three is "more popular than it used to be." Each one simply has more to point to.

So, is the market actually moving?

Yes — and more confidently than the simple version of this story would suggest. A bubble that deflates indiscriminately, regardless of who actually deserved to keep their value, isn't behaving like a market reading anything at all — and that's exactly what the 2022 crash looked like. What's happening now is closer to the opposite: trading that's broader and more frequent than even the original frenzy, sorting the names we follow into very different outcomes that line up, case by case, with what actually happened on the court.

The rest of the names we follow aren't randomly stuck below their old highs, either, even though we haven't told their stories here. Each has its own specific reason — an injury that struck right when it mattered most, a trade that blew up a city's relationship with its franchise player, hype that outran the résumé before the résumé had a chance to catch up, or a championship that already got fully priced in years before the rest of this story even started. We'll go through those one at a time in the pieces ahead.

That's the lens we're going to keep applying here: not whether a price went up, but whether there's something real, and something specific, behind it. Next, we'll look closely at the one card that's broken every pattern in this piece — Victor Wembanyama's — and what it means that a card with almost no trading history changed the character of the whole market once it had one.