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Dan HajduckyESPN
The basketball card that rapper and NBA superfan Drake spent at least $200,000 trying to find — the 2020-21 Panini Flawless Triple Logoman LeBron James card, numbered one-of-one — sold at auction Saturday night with collectibles marketplace Goldin for $2.4 million, including buyer’s premium.
Logoman cards — featuring the NBA logo cut from a player’s jersey — are some of the most sought-after modern cards in the hobby. Panini’s 2020-21 Flawless release (10-card Hobby boxes are currently selling for roughly $15,000) includes five Triple Logoman cards, all numbered one-of-one: a Draymond Green/Stephen Curry/Klay Thompson, Anthony Edwards/LaMelo Ball/Tyrese Haliburton, Jayson Tatum/Luka Doncic/Zion Williamson and Giannis Antetokounmpo/Kevin Durant/Stephen Curry.
The fifth card is the LeBron James version that just sold, embedded with NBA logo patches from “game-worn/used” James jerseys from each of his three career teams: the Cleveland Cavaliers, Miami Heat and Los Angeles Lakers.
“Typically, it’s the older vintage cards that are very valuable,” Ken Goldin, founder and executive chairman of Goldin told The Associated Press. “But there’s really never been a card this popular before it was even pulled from a pack.”
Multiple outlets purported that the James card would break the all-time records for both a modern sports and basketball card — both, uncoincidentally, held by a 2003-04 Upper Deck Exquisite LeBron James RPA (rookie patch autograph) parallel, numbered out of 23, which sold for $5.2 million with PWCC Marketplace in April 2021.
While some thought the Triple Logoman could challenge the T206 Honus Wagner card that sold for an all-time record $6.606 million last August, the market has cooled from its pandemic-aided boom. (An Exquisite LeBron RPA parallel also sold with Goldin tonight — albeit one that received a lower grade from Beckett Grading Services — for $2.1 million.)
James made waves in July 2020 — after one of those 23 RPA parallels broke the then-record for a basketball card, selling at a Goldin auction for $1.845 million — when he remarked that he had “a couple of those exact ones too.”