A jersey worn by Michael Jordan in Game 2 of the 1998 NBA Finals has sold for US$14 million, a record for a piece of basketball memorabilia. Hunt Auctions announced the private sale on Monday. The buyer is Ron Firman, a real estate investor from Miami.
The game was played on 5 June 1998 in Salt Lake City. The Chicago Bulls beat the Utah Jazz 93-88 to level the series at 1-1, with Jordan scoring 37 points and adding five rebounds and three assists. The Bulls went on to take the series in six games, and Jordan collected his sixth Finals Most Valuable Player award nine days after the match.
The shirt is described as game-worn and autographed.
It displaces a record set only weeks ago. In September the home jersey Jordan wore in Game 3 of the same series sold at auction for US$12.26 million. The new sale ranks second among game-worn sports jerseys of any kind; the leader remains Babe Ruth's New York Yankees jersey from Game 3 of the 1932 World Series, which fetched US$24.12 million in 2024.
David Hunt, president of Hunt Auctions, called the sale "yet another corroborative result as to the significance of Jordan within the industry and popular culture", and said the jersey "bore witness to one of Jordan's most hallowed NBA Finals appearances".
He added that the jersey's value had "escalated to an elite asset class more typically reserved for iconic works of art".
That last description is worth taking at face value, because the supply side of this particular asset class is unusually easy to count.
The 1998 Finals went six games. Jordan therefore wore six Finals jerseys that season, two of which have changed hands at record prices within about a month of each other.
This is a closed set of six units, a third of it now realised. Four remain unlisted, and no further issuance is possible, because the series has finished and cannot be extended. The order of sale is instructive too: Game 3 traded in September, Game 2 in October, so the series is being brought to market in reverse, leaving the opening fixture as the next obvious listing and making the earliest shirt in the sequence the last to be priced.
There is also now a unit rate. Fourteen million dollars across 37 points works out at roughly $378,000 a point, which appears to be the first published clearing price for a single point scored in an NBA Finals game.
On that basis the Ruth shirt remains the benchmark and basketball has $10.12 million of ground to make up, a gap the 1998 Finals can still cover from existing inventory without anybody playing anything.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has asked Hunt Auctions to confirm which asset is actually being traded, the jersey or the series.
There are four shirts left, and no remaining games in which to produce any more.