Basketball card player tiers, from 65,000 sales

October 3, 2026

Every break guide has to answer one question before any other: whose cards are worth pulling? Most tier lists are opinion. We built ours from sales: 64,841 sold raw cards across four 2025-26 Topps basketball products (Chrome Update, Chrome, Flagship and Pristine), from early July to October 3, 2026.

How the number works

For each sale we know the player, the set, the parallel and how rare that version is. A model splits each price into those parts, so a player's number is what's left once the card itself is accounted for: a Gold /50 of one player against a Gold /50 of another.

1.0× is the average player. A player at 2.0× sells for twice the average player's price on the same card. Players with few sales are pulled toward the average until the sales say otherwise. Only players with at least 150 sales are ranked here (84 of 390).

The top 30

Rank	Player	Demand	Sales
1	Cooper Flagg	13.0×	7,488
2	Dylan Harper	4.3×	4,490
3	LeBron James	2.8×	2,439
4	Victor Wembanyama	2.4×	3,080
5	Stephen Curry	2.3×	1,861
6	Kon Knueppel	2.2×	2,998
7	VJ Edgecombe	1.9×	2,408
8	Luka Dončić	1.4×	1,060
9	Ace Bailey	1.3×	1,317
10	Stephon Castle	1.3×	813
11	Shai Gilgeous-Alexander	1.2×	1,114
12	Anthony Edwards	1.2×	1,188
13	Jalen Brunson	1.1×	1,354
14	Cade Cunningham	1.0×	434
15	Nikola Jokić	0.9×	496
16	Giannis Antetokounmpo	0.9×	277
17	Kevin Durant	0.9×	457
18	Cedric Coward	0.9×	720
19	Kareem Abdul-Jabbar	0.8×	217
20	Dwyane Wade	0.8×	158
21	Tyrese Maxey	0.8×	358
22	James Harden	0.8×	173
23	Karl-Anthony Towns	0.8×	277
24	Shaquille O'Neal	0.8×	740
25	OG Anunoby	0.8×	232
26	Tre Johnson III	0.8×	328
27	Donovan Mitchell	0.8×	236
28	Joan Beringer	0.8×	575
29	Carter Bryant	0.8×	608
30	Devin Booker	0.7×	244

What stands out

Flagg is his own tier. At 13×, he is three times the next player and nearly as much as the next five combined. He also has the most sales of anyone, 7,488, so this is the best-measured number on the list.

Then a group of six. Harper, LeBron, Wembanyama, Curry, Knueppel and Edgecombe sit between about 2× and 4×. Three of them are this season's rookies.

After that, it's flat. From Dončić at 1.4× down to the 30th player at 0.7×, the whole range is a factor of two. An MVP like Jokić (0.9×) or Giannis (0.9×) sells for about what the average player on the checklist does. In a rookie-year product, being great isn't the same as being chased.

The bottom isn't zero. The lowest-ranked players with 150 sales sit around 0.45×. Half the average, not a tenth.

How this compares with a hand-made tier list

Before we had the sales, we tiered players by hand: S, A, B and untiered. Lining those up with what the sales say:

Hand-set tier	Players ranked	Typical demand	Range
S	10	2.3×	1.2× to 13.0×
A	18	0.8×	0.6× to 1.4×
B	35	0.7×	0.4× to 0.9×
Untiered	21	0.6×	0.4× to 0.8×

The order was right. The spacing wasn't. Tier A and tier B turned out to be nearly the same thing, and tier S hid a range of more than ten to one. A four-step list can't hold a market shaped like this, which is why WaxMath now prices from the demand number directly wherever a product has enough sales.

What it means if you're buying a break spot

A team's value is mostly one or two players. With demand this top-heavy, the Mavericks and Spurs carry far more than their share, and a team without a top-eight player depends on hitting something rare.
Veteran stars don't carry a rookie-year product. A LeBron or Curry auto is worth having, but at 2× to 3×, not Flagg's 13×.
Don't pay up for a "good roster". Twelve solid players at 0.8× each don't add up to one Harper.

Caveats

These are raw (ungraded) eBay sales of four 2025-26 products. Graded cards and auction-house results aren't in here, and the very top of the market sells there.
A demand number is relative to this season's checklists. It will move with the season, with injuries, and when the 2026-27 rookies arrive.
Sale-to-sale noise is large: two sales of the same card on the same day are typically a third apart. The rankings near the top rest on thousands of sales each; a gap of 0.1× lower down isn't meaningful.

Numbers as of October 3, 2026.