A certain kind of energy builds in the sports card market when a city that hasn’t won anything in more than fifty years starts to believe again. This energy is really strong in New York right now; it’s raw and a little feverish, and it’s really clear in the sales numbers.
This 2018 Panini Prizm Jalen Brunson Blue Prizm rookie card was graded PSA 10 and was one of only 199 ever made. It sold on eBay for $3,383 on May 31, 2026. This card has never been used that many times before. The same card sold for $1,500 a year ago. That’s a rise of more than 125% in twelve months, and the fact that the card has changed hands nine times in that time shows how quickly collectors have been after it.
Take a step back and think about what that number really means. This is a rookie card from 2018, and it wasn’t exactly making waves in the hobby when Brunson was still playing backup for Luka Dončić in Dallas. The market for this card is now based mostly on what Brunson is now, not on what he used to be. That change feels like it has meaning.
Scarcity is one of the things that is driving up the price. There are only 24 copies of this card in PSA 10, which is way too few for serious collectors to want to let go of one. It’s a tight market and one player averaged 26.0 points and 6.8 assists during the regular season and then 27.1 points and 6.3 assists during a deep playoff run. This means that anyone who bought early and held on will benefit. Some people may not have held because they were sure of what they were doing, but the ones who did look pretty smart right now.
As of this writing, the Knicks are in the middle of their most important playoff run since that unlikely run to the 1999 Finals. They are also playing San Antonio, which is something that New Yorkers haven’t missed. Brunson has been the main force behind everything. In the fourth quarter, he’s steady in a way that doesn’t always show up in the box scores. He’s not scared. What does the Garden do? It turns out that the card market does too.
After a championship run, legacies and card values tend to become more clear. It’s possible that a PSA 10 Blue Prizm /199 like the one that just sold for $3,383 could go up to or above $5,000 if the Knicks won the championship. It’s still not clear where the ceiling is, but the more expensive Brunson pieces are already very striking. It was sold for $79,300 in December 2024. It was a 2018-19 National Treasures Rookie Patch Autograph Logoman card graded BGS 8.5 with a 10 auto. That number would probably go up even more if they won the championship, but it’s hard to say for sure what the exact numbers will be in this market because the patterns are solid in terms of direction but not in terms of specifics.
So far, it’s clear that Brunson’s card market is no longer a niche subject. It’s a real market with real momentum, built on real play in the most watched basketball city in the league. The bigger point is the same whether the Knicks finish what they started or fall short: Jalen Brunson has crossed the line between being a player people watch and a player people collect. Once that change happens, it rarely goes back. The $3,383 sale on a card that sold for $1,500 a year ago isn’t the highest point. It’s a message.
