68. Air Jordan Hysteria

With all the Jordan hysteria going on and the 1986 Fleer Jordan so called rookie card selling for $10,000 or more in PSA 8 (see below) it was to be expected that the Jordan Nike cards that predate the rookie would catch on sooner or later. 

I'm writing this blog because I hate to see anyone taken advantage of, especially because they were unaware of accurate and true data on the subject. 

It appears that there is significant confusion over what the Nike Jordan rookie card really is. Who better to answer that question than the Nike poster card web page. 

As we explained in blog 15, Jordan signed his Bulls contract and his Nike contract in the fall of 1984. In quick order in early 1985 Nike put out the first Jordan poster 290850 and the corresponding Nike poster card and labeled it 290850 Air Jordan - Michael Jordan. If we look up the PSA population report as of March 30th 2021 there have been 29 graded including (4) 7's, (9) 8s, (7) 9s and (0) 10s

There was also a set released in 1985 by Nike called a promo set which included cards of the 1985 posters of Jordan, Gooden, McEnroe, Lofton and Lance Parrish.  To date PSA reports that more that 2,960 Air Jordan "promo cards" have been graded including more than 1000 8's, 1000 9s and 168 PSA 10s. These are 3 x 5 (not 5 x 7) and are all shown in blog #2. It is probably a safe guess to say that more of these were released than NPCs

So when you see adds like this :

Clearly understand that these are the Jordan promo cards and there are more than 3000 of them graded. Since there are literally 100X more of these graded than the actual Nike poster cards (NPC) (290850) does that mean the NPC should be selling for $500,000 in PSA 9 ??

Lastly the official 1986 Fleer "rookie" (card #57)  in the PSA population report as of March 31 shows more than 20,000 pieces graded with more than 8000 PSA 8s, 3000 9s and  316 PSA 10s. 

This mans logic tells me that the pricing that is out there for these cannot be sustained. 

It also tells me that the best buy in Jordan rookie cards is the Nike poster card rookie 290850 that only 29 of us currently own !