49 bids push a 1986 Jordan to $18,950

A BGS 9.5 Star Best of the Best #9 drew 49 bids on Monday, and still was not the day's biggest Jordan figure.

A 1986 Star Best of the Best #9 Michael Jordan, graded BGS 9.5, sold for $18,950 on Monday after 49 bids. It was the most notable Jordan card sale of a day that cleared 531 qualifying single-card sales.

Why it matters

Bid count is the cleanest demand signal eBay gives a collector. A fixed price tells you what one seller asked; an auction that runs to 49 bids tells you what the market was willing to do. This one got there without being the day’s highest number.

By the numbers

• $18,950 — the auction close on the BGS 9.5 Star #9, across 49 bids.
• $560,236.46 — confirmed paid across 382 single-card Jordan sales on Monday, on a $539.41 confirmed median.
• $28,700 — Monday’s top confirmed sale, a 1997-98 Topps Rock Stars Refractor Die-Cut in PSA 10, on 28 bids.

Zoom in

The most contested Jordan card of the day was not this one. A 1987 Fleer #59 in PSA 7 pulled 71 bids and closed at $1,130 — the highest bid count on any Jordan card we tracked Monday, at a fraction of the Star’s price. Bidder count tracks how many people can afford to play, not only how much they want the card.

Reality check

Monday’s largest Jordan figure was $29,000, on a 1998 SkyBox E-X Century Dunk N Go Nuts in BGS 9.5. That listing accepted a best offer, and eBay publishes the asking price on those, never the accepted one — so nobody outside the transaction knows what was paid. Of Monday’s 531 qualifying sales, 149 settled that way, carrying $213,374.54 in asking prices that are not sale prices. It is why we lead on the auction. Our last full read was the August 28 Jordan column.

How we track this

RazMania monitors completed eBay sales daily, filtering out multi-card lots, reprints, and cross-listed items to isolate genuine single-card sales. Monday’s window held 531 qualifying Jordan single-card sales and was cross-checked against an independent probe, which found no same-day sales missing from it. No comparable-sales median is quoted here: the baseline pool for this card ran from $910 to $110,000 across 116 sales, far too wide to be a like-for-like comparison. eBay reports sold date, not sold time.