Same LeBron rookie sold for $5,075 and $740

Six copies of the 2003 Topps #221 rookie cleared Thursday, and the ungraded one outsold both a PSA 8 and a BGS 8.5.

A PSA 10 copy of LeBron James’s 2003 Topps #221 rookie sold for $5,075.42 on Thursday against 31 bids. An ungraded copy of the same card closed the same day at $740.00 on 39 bids — 6.86x, a $4,335.42 gap, and the widest multiple on the board.

Why it matters

Most of a graded-versus-raw gap is the grade itself, which is what a grade is for. The informative part is where the ungraded copy landed: at $740.00 on 39 bids it beat a PSA 8 at $689.00 and a BGS 8.5 at $687.00 from the same day. At the bottom of this rookie’s ladder, the slab was worth less than a raw copy with bidders on it. The same #221 ran in our October 21 edition.

By the numbers

• 6 copies — of #221 cleared in one day, from the PSA 10 at $5,075.42 to a PSA 6 at $480.00.
• $38,999.00 — the day’s widest gap, and not the lead: a PSA 9 1986 Fleer #57 at $49,000.00 against an ungraded copy at $10,001.00 on 44 bids.
• $495.00 and $615.00 — median confirmed-paid price across the 211 Jordan and 89 LeBron sales we tracked.

Zoom in

The sharpest number of the day never reached the table. Two PSA 10 copies of the 2003 Topps Chrome #111 LeBron rookie closed $75.06 apart — $11,369.65 on 42 bids against $11,294.59 on 33 — a 1.01x spread, refused under the 1.25x floor. Every row above is a slab against a raw copy; no two same-grade copies cleared.

Reality check

Two of the six rows rest on a dearer copy that drew no bids, so the multiple there is an asking price somebody met rather than one bidding established. The 1987 Fleer #59 row clears the 1.50x spread floor by 6.7% with neither side contested — one unseen cheaper copy removes it. The 2020 Prizm row had two copies on the day, so there is no third rung to check it against.

What's next

The matcher built 17 comparisons on Thursday and 6 cleared the floors. Eight price-band audits and both completeness probes came back clean, which is the strongest frame evidence this method produces and still not a census. Best Offer listings were 70 of 281 Jordan sales and 41 of 130 LeBron sales, and all of them are excluded here. Previous editions: sports collectibles.

How we track this

RazMania compares completed eBay sales of the same card that closed on the same day. Two sales are treated as the same card only when the player, year, set, card number, parallel or photo variation, print-run serial, autograph status and altered status all match — so a Refractor is never compared against a base card. Best Offer sales are excluded entirely, because eBay publishes the seller’s asking price on those and never the settled figure; every price here is a confirmed paid price. Multi-card lots, reprints and customs are filtered out. We quote no comparable-sales median and no 90-day pool — both prices in every comparison closed on the same day. eBay reports sold date, not sold time.