Vintage Basketball Autographs

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A game-used basketball, basketball card, or jersey is immeasurably enhanced if it bears the signature of a great player from the NBA or ABA. Signatures that are among the most sought by collectors of vintage basketball memorabilia include Bill...
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A game-used basketball, basketball card, or jersey is immeasurably enhanced if it bears the signature of a great player from the NBA or ABA. Signatures that are among the most sought by collectors of vintage basketball memorabilia include Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Julius Erving, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, LeBron James, and Stephen Curry. In general, the signatures of players from the 1970s and earlier are tougher to find than players from more recent decades. Simply put, that's because basketball memorabilia was not the commodity it is today. Even though, at any given moment, there are dozens of signed basketball cards on eBay with active bids in the four figures and higher, those prices are the result of contrived scarcity, in which manufacturers such as Upper Deck and Panini produce cards in editions as low as one. The values of these cards may be real—a Stephen Curry 1/1 card was purchased in 2021 by an investment company called Alt Fund for $5.9 million—but the prices are artificially achieved. More "organic" is the scarcity of cards—and thus cards bearing autographs—from before 1976, when the ABA was swallowed up by the NBA. Topps did not start printing cards that could be signed by members of the ABA until 1971, four years after the league had been founded. Even then, Topps only published cards for stars such as Rick Barry of the New York Nets, Moses Malone before he became a force for the Houston Rockets, David Thompson of the Denver Nuggets, and, of course, Dr. J. Another vintage basketball card publisher whose cards were perfect for autographs was Fleer, which printed Michael Jordan's Chicago Bullsrookie card in 1986. In 1961, Fleer also published rookie cards for Wilt Chamberlain of the Philadelphia Warriors, Oscar Robertson of the Cincinnati Royals, and Jerry West and Elgin Baylor of the Los Angeles Lakers. Any of these with a signature would be quite a prize. Even scarcer are signatures on...
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