Note · 17 August 2026
There is no list of the most expensive game-worn jerseys ever sold. There are only lists of the most expensive jerseys sold by somebody. So we built the one nobody sells.
The list everybody cites is Sotheby’s. It is titled, honestly enough, Top 10 Most Valuable NBA Jerseys Ever Sold at Sotheby’s — and then it travels, losing those last three words somewhere between the source and the citation.
A jersey does not know which house sold it. So we put every basketball jersey we can verify above roughly $700,000 into one column, from any house, using Sotheby’s published figures, our own capture of Goldin’s sold archive, our 5,796-lot dataset, and our live capture of a sale that closed last night.
Four of the real top ten are not on Sotheby’s list. Neither is the jersey that closed on Sunday night.
All figures include the buyer’s premium. Bold is everything absent from the list that gets cited.
| # | Lot | House | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Michael Jordan — 1998 Finals Game 1, “The Last Dance” | Sotheby’s | $10,091,000 |
| 2 | Kobe Bryant — 1996-97 debut jersey | Sotheby’s | $7,000,000 |
| 3 | Kobe Bryant — 2007-08 MVP season, 25 games | Sotheby’s | $5,849,700 |
| 4 | Wilt Chamberlain — 1972 Finals Game 5, championship-clinching | Sotheby’s | $4,900,000 |
| 5 | LeBron James — 2013 Finals Game 7, championship-clinching | Sotheby’s | $3,680,000 |
| 6 | Kobe Bryant — 1996-97 rookie season, matched to 7 games | Goldin | $3,600,000 |
| 7 | Michael Jordan — 1992 Olympic “Dream Team”, matched, signed | Goldin | $3,030,000 |
| 8 | Michael Jordan — 1992-93 Bulls uniform, matched to 7 games | Heritage | $2,623,000 |
| 9 | Kobe Bryant — 2009 Finals Game 1, 40 points | Sotheby’s | $1,754,000 |
| 10 | Kobe / LeBron / Curry / Dončić — All-Star jersey collection | Goldin | $1,342,000 |
| 11 | Kareem Abdul-Jabbar — 1968 UCLA championship, net-cutting match | Grey Flannel | $1,254,919 |
| 12 | Michael Jordan — 1998 East Finals Games 3 & 4, matched | Goldin | $1,049,200 |
| 13 | Luka Dončić — rookie debut, matched to 3 games, 31 points | Sotheby’s | $1,024,000 |
| 14 | Jalen Brunson — 2026 NBA Finals debut | Sotheby’s | $1,024,000 |
| 15 | Bill Russell — 1966 Finals Game 7, matched, signed | Goldin | $966,000 |
| 16 | Kobe Bryant — 2009 Finals Game 3 away, matched | Goldin | $915,000 |
| 17 | Larry Bird — 1992 Olympic “Dream Team”, signed | Sotheby’s | $896,000 |
| 18 | Michael Jordan — 1998 East Semis Game 2, matched, signed | Goldin | $799,100 |
| 19 | Victor Wembanyama — rookie debut | Sotheby’s | $762,000 |
| 20 | Michael Jordan — 1997-98 “The Last Dance”, matched to 8 games | Sotheby’s | $698,500 |
Eleven of twenty are Sotheby’s. Nine are not. In the top ten it is six and four.
Here is the part it would be dishonest to leave out. Build the list properly, from the outside, and Sotheby’s still takes eleven of the twenty places and all of the top five. Their claim to dominate the top of this market is true.
It just could not be established by them. An interested party cannot certify its own record, and until somebody counted the other houses, nobody could say whether the claim was six out of twenty or twenty out of twenty. It happens to be eleven.
That is what an independent count is for. Not to catch anybody out — to find out.
The page says last updated 7 August 2025. In April 2025, four months earlier, Sotheby’s sold Kobe Bryant’s debut jersey for $7,000,000 — the second-highest price on this entire list, and a record for any Kobe item at auction. It is not on their top ten.
Neither is Luka Dončić’s rookie debut jersey at $1,024,000, nor Jalen Brunson’s Finals debut at $1,024,000, both sold by Sotheby’s this summer, both of which beat five of the ten entries they do show.
A record that omits your own second-biggest sale is not a record. It is a page somebody forgot.
Grey Flannel Auction #67 shut its doors at 8:00pm on 16 August, then kept going for hours the way these sales do. Lot 1 was Lew Alcindor’s UCLA jersey, photo-matched to the 1968 NCAA championship net-cutting and the 1969 Final Four — the jersey a collector acquired about fifty years ago in exchange for a transistor radio.
It closed at $1,028,622 hammer, or $1,254,919 all-in. Eleventh all-time, the highest price we can find for a college basketball jersey, and the highest for any basketball jersey outside Sotheby’s, Goldin and Heritage.
We watched that lot for five days, eight times. It sat at $850,101 from Wednesday to Sunday morning without taking a single bid, then moved 21% in the ten hours around its own close. If you had checked the price at breakfast on the day it sold, you would have been wrong by two hundred and seventeen thousand dollars by bedtime.
Read the column of descriptions rather than the column of numbers. Fourteen of the twenty name a specific occasion: a Finals game, a debut, an Olympic final, a championship clinched, a net-cutting. Fifteen are photo-matched or matched to named games. Not one is on this list for being a nice example of a jersey.
The two entries that name only a season rather than a night — Kobe’s MVP year and the 1992-93 Bulls uniform — are each matched to multiple specific games, which is the same claim made sideways.
Nobody up here is buying the jersey.
All prices are as published by the selling house and include the buyer’s premium. What we would want checked before anyone leans on this:
This list will be wrong within weeks. Sales happen. Send us the ones we missed and we will put them in — including the ones that push our own entry down.