Sometime in the late 1970s, a teenager in a Forum parking lot traded his transistor radio for a UCLA jersey. This week, that jersey sold for $1.25 million. Meanwhile, Pharrell Williams put a $10 to $15 million estimate on Michael Jordan's Last Dance jersey, a Jordan insert from 1997 became a $1.47 million card, and Jay-Z decided the smartest place to park his money is a card shop.

Just a normal week in our hobby.

What we’re covering:

🏀 Jordan's Last Dance jersey chases the all-time basketball record
📈 The 10 hottest things to collect right now, ranked
📻 The $1.25 million jersey that cost a transistor radio
🏪 Jay-Z, Aaron Judge, and Connor McDavid buy into Tom Brady's card shops
🔥 Heatseekers: Top upcoming releases

Let’s get into it.

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Last week Michael Jordan moved $4.7 million in memorabilia. This week he raised the stakes.

JOOPITER, the auction house founded by Pharrell Williams, announced it will offer Jordan's game-worn jersey from Game 3 of the 1998 NBA Finals with a $10 million to $15 million estimate. Bidding opens September 15 in an auction titled "Driven to Greatness."

Why this jersey: Jordan wore it on June 7, 1998, when the Bulls beat the Jazz 96-54, still the largest margin of victory in Finals history. It's MeiGray photomatched, and JOOPITER says it's the only publicly known white 1998 Finals Jordan jersey to ever surface.

The number to beat: Jordan's Game 1 jersey from the same series sold for $10.1 million at Sotheby's in 2022, still the record for any basketball jersey. If this one lands mid-estimate, it’ll solidly beat that record.

Jordan's cardboard kept pace, too. A 1997-98 Metal Universe Precious Metal Gems Red, graded just a BGS 8, sold for $1,473,989 at Alt this week, the most ever paid at auction for any PMG card, any player, any year. The previous benchmark for the card was a higher-graded BGS 8.5 that sold for $651,333 in December. This copy more than doubled it with a lower grade.

Sponsored by FinanceBuzz

Collectibles.com just dug through index data, auction results, grading volumes, and resale trends to rank the 10 trendiest things to collect in 2026, and the top of the list won't surprise HobbyCrunch readers: Pokémon is #1 on the list.

The rankings run from sneakers at #10 up through comics, game-used memorabilia, retired LEGO, Y2K digicams, vinyl, sealed video games, modern sports cards, and blind-box toys. A few highlights:

Every category comes with a "getting in" playbook, plus what's quietly deflating. Worth a bookmark before you chase anything viral.

Read the full rankings here.

The best trade in hobby history might have happened in a parking lot.

Sometime in the mid-to-late 1970s, a teenager from South Gate, California was waiting outside the Forum after a Lakers game when he swapped his prized transistor radio for a UCLA jersey worn by Lew Alcindor, the player the world now knows as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

He held it for roughly half a century. Then Grey Flannel Auctions photomatched it to the 1968 national championship game, where Alcindor dropped 34 points and 16 rebounds on North Carolina, plus the 1969 Final Four semifinal against Drake. On Sunday, the jersey closed at $1,254,918.

A radio in, seven figures out. Somewhere, the Bucks front office that traded Kareem for four players in 1975 would like a word.

And they're buying it.

CardVault by Tom Brady announced its first strategic investor group last Thursday, and the roster reads like a Fanatics Fest guest list: Jay-Z, Aaron Judge, Connor McDavid, Dana White, Fenway Sports Group's John Henry, the Kraft Group, RedBird Capital founder Gerry Cardinale, and Silver Lake's co-CEOs, among others.

The trajectory explains the interest. Since Brady bought a 50% stake in February 2025, CardVault has grown from 3 stores to 17, with revenue reportedly up more than 400% over the past year and roughly 24 locations expected by year end. The long-term goal: a 100-plus store national network, plus Brady-branded vending machines and an expanded live-breaking arm.

When the athletes on the cards start buying the stores that sell them, the hobby can’t help but feel optimistic.

The world of collectibles is wide and deep, and there's a constant stream of new releases. Here are some of the big ones that are coming up:

The through line this week is patience. A teenager made a trade in a parking lot and waited fifty years. Somebody left eight packs of 1952 Topps unopened for seven decades. A jersey came off Jordan's back in 1998 and is only now approaching the auction block with a $15 million ceiling.

The hobby loves to talk about the flip: the $515 break spot, the redemption pulled three packs in. But the biggest numbers this week belonged to people who did nothing at all except hold on.

See you next week!