A Giannis Antetokounmpo debut ticket has lost 94% of its value since 2022

That record was set seven months after Giannis won the championship and the Finals MVP, and nothing in his career has gone backwards since. He passed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as Milwaukee's all-time leading scorer that April, and set the franchise record with 64 points on 13 December 2023. Over the same four years the ticket that records his first NBA game fell from $22,200 to $1,220, a drop of 94.5%. Every price here comes from the 16 single-ticket public sales of the 30 October 2013 game in the auction data we compile from Heritage, Goldin and Fanatics Collect, 8 March 2021 to 15 March 2026. One lot is excluded from every figure, a complete 2013-14 Knicks season ticket book that happened to contain the debut ticket, because its price cannot be assigned to a single ticket. Fourteen of the 16 grades were read back off PSA's own record for that cert rather than lifted from the auction title. Populations were read live from PSA on 14 August 2026.

115 graded debut tickets

Giannis was the 15th pick of the 2013 draft and he played four minutes and 43 seconds at Madison Square Garden, scoring one point from two free throws. He did not attempt a field goal and he did not take a rebound. PSA's own cataloguing agrees with the box score: it files his first field goal, first rebound and first win under the next game, at Boston two nights later. The Knicks won 90-83, and the ticket carries a photograph of Carmelo Anthony.

No grade of this ticket is hard to find. Twenty-five GEM MT 10s exist, and 79 of the 115, 69%, grade NM 7 or better. The scarce copies are the poor ones: a single GD 2, a single VG-EX 4, and nothing at all at PSA 1, 1.5 or 3. The one clue in the sale record about where they all came from is the earliest Giannis debut lot we hold, from January 2021, which was not a ticket at all but a complete 2013-14 Knicks season ticket book containing the debut, sold for $570. PSA files the item in its 2013 New York Knicks group, alongside 20 graded copies of Stephen Curry's 54-point night at the Garden from the same season, which has produced exactly one public sale, a signed copy at $561 in May 2026. Stephen Curry's own debut ticket is a separate market again.

Our reference holds 72 of the 115 certs, and they arrive in blocks rather than one at a time, because PSA numbers a grading submission consecutively. Certs 46906690 to 46906699 are ten consecutive unsigned copies from one submission, six GEM MT 10s and four MINT 9s, and not one of them has ever been offered. Certs 63694584 to 63694608 are twenty-five consecutive signed copies from another, of which exactly one has sold.

The 2022 window

Ten of the 16 sales happened in 2022, and they carry $58,835 of the $72,865 ever spent on this ticket, or 81%. Then it stopped. One sale in 2023, three in 2024, none at all in 2025, and one so far in 2026. The whole record is 16 lots across two houses, eight at Goldin and eight at Heritage.

Grade does not order this list. The best unsigned result on record is $7,302 for a MINT 9 in January 2022. The GEM MT 10 above it, the top grade the ticket comes in, made $5,640 four months later, $2,280 four months after that, and $1,170 by April 2024. Five GEM MT 10 sales exist and they run $5,640, $3,240, $2,280, $2,400 and $1,170 in date order, which is a fall of 79% from the first to the last. The bidding fell with the prices: the January 2022 MINT 9 drew 29 bids at Goldin, the March 2026 sale drew 11 at the same house. Heritage does not report bid counts, and Goldin's figures for 2021 lots are placeholders, so the March 2021 sale is left out of that comparison.

Two round trips

Two slabs have been through the market twice, which is the cleanest measure available because the object is held still between the readings. Cert 63755777, an NM-MT 8 carrying a PSA/DNA GEM MT 10 signature, made $6,300 at Heritage in February 2023 and $1,220 at Goldin in March 2026, down 80.6% in three years and one month. It drew 11 bids the second time.

The second one can no longer be checked. Cert 62477579 made $3,240 at Heritage in August 2022 and $1,170 at the same house in April 2024, down 63.9% in twenty months, and PSA's database now returns it as intentionally deactivated with no grade, checked 14 August 2026. Two further Giannis debut certs in our reference, 65839300 and 65839301, read the same way. Larry Bird's 1979 debut produced three repeat sales and two of them went in this direction as well, so a debut ticket losing half its value on a second pass is not unusual. Losing four fifths of it is.

Fifty-two Giannis signatures

Section 211, row 12, seat 10 at Madison Square Garden, face value $98.00, signed across the front and inscribed NBA DEBUT. PSA graded the ticket NM-MT 8 and the signature GEM MT 10. It drew 38 bids at Goldin in April 2022, the most reported on any Giannis debut lot, and made $4,800. The next seat along, row 12 seat 11, is cert 63755777, 23 numbers away in the same run of certs: two adjacent seats, signed and slabbed together.

Fifty-two of the 115 graded copies, 45%, carry his signature. PSA counts them in a second report, so the 63 unsigned copies and the 51 signed ones are two separate populations of the same ticket, and the lone box office print exists only as a signed Authentic copy. The record is a signed MINT 9 at $22,200; the best unsigned result is the same MINT 9 ticket grade at $7,302, three times less, in the same year. Since February 2022 no signed copy has cleared $6,300 and none has cleared $1,800 since August 2024.

Today's debut ticket value

Signed, in mid grade, this is a $1,200 to $1,800 ticket. The last two signed results were $1,800 for an EX-MT 6 in August 2024 and $1,220 for an NM-MT 8 in March 2026. Unsigned, at the very top grade, it is a $1,200 to $2,400 ticket, on the last two GEM MT 10 sales, February and April 2024. Nothing of any kind has sold above $2,400 since February 2023, and the only sale in the last twenty months is the March 2026 one. There is no scarcity anywhere in the ladder to argue with those figures: 25 perfect copies exist and just four of them have ever come to auction.

Everything genuinely scarce about Giannis's first week is unsold. Two nights after the debut he made his first NBA field goal, took his first rebound and won his first game, at Boston on 1 November 2013. PSA catalogues that ticket on its own and 12 copies exist, nine unsigned and three signed. The night after that he played his home debut in Milwaukee, and PSA has graded exactly one copy of it, a PSA PR 1. Neither has ever been offered at public auction in the data we track. The only Giannis first anyone actually buys is the one there are 115 of. For contrast, Larry Bird's debut survives in 16 unsigned copies, a quarter of the Giannis figure, and holds a record three and a half times higher. Luka Doncic's debut ticket is the other modern case worth reading beside this one.