Search Lew Alcindor, not Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, for the debut ticket that sold for $36,600

That is the whole market. Two stubs, both at Goldin, both unsigned, $48,600 between them. The first went for its $10,000 opening bid with the game program thrown in. The second, a cert number issued in 2026 and sold the same summer, took 32 bids to $30,000 on the hammer. Nothing from the game has appeared on eBay, and WorthPoint holds no record of one, raw or graded. Every figure in this post comes from the graded-ticket sales we aggregate across Goldin, Heritage, REA, Fanatics Collect, Lelands and the eBay results recorded by WorthPoint, 2017 to 2026, built from PSA's own item ids for the game and checked cert by cert. Population figures are PSA's unsigned ticket report, census of 8 July 2026, re-read live on 6 October 2026.

The NBA was his first professional league

The official debut is the Bucks' first game of the 1969-70 season, Saturday 18 October 1969, a 1:00 PM tip at the Milwaukee Arena. Milwaukee beat Detroit 119-110 and Alcindor scored 29 points with 12 rebounds in front of 7,782 people and an ABC Wide World of Sports audience (box score, season record, NBA archive film). There is no earlier professional game to look for. The expansion Bucks won the coin flip for the first pick on 19 March 1969, he chose the NBA over the ABA's New York offer, and he signed on 3 April. By 25 April the club had requests for 6,000 season tickets in a 10,746-seat building, which is why the Arena Circle stubs were printed as a season book, Game 1.

Two other 1969 tickets get sold as his first professional game and are not. PSA's own label for the 22 June 1969 rookie camp stub reads "Lew Alcindor Pro Debut", but White 125, Green 118 was an intrasquad scrimmage at the Bucks' camp, not a game against anyone. The 4 October 1969 Knicks stub is his first game at Madison Square Garden, and it is preseason. Local reporting at the time called the Pistons game the start of it: "The age of Alcindor begins".

PSA files the ticket under the name on the programme

The slab reads LEW ALCINDOR NBA DEBUT, because that is the name the ticket, the programme and the 1969 box score carry. Search our population report or PSA's for "Kareem Abdul-Jabbar debut" and the Bucks stub does not come back; the item that does is his Lakers debut six years later. That mislabelling by habit is the reason a buyer who wants the first NBA game ends up bidding on the second team's first game. The box below searches the report as we hold it; type Alcindor and the 1969 set is the first result.

Four unsigned copies exist, and two of them are the ones that sold

PSA's unsigned report for the 1969 Milwaukee Bucks stub holds four copies of the debut item as of the 8 July 2026 census: one Authentic, one PR 1 and two VG-EX 4, plus a fifth stub catalogued separately for glue and paper residue, also Authentic. A full-ticket set for the game exists in the catalogue and is empty: no full ticket of the 18 October 1969 game has been graded. We re-read the cert pages on 6 October 2026 and nothing had moved: the $36,600 VG-EX 4 reads population 2 with none higher, so it is tied for the finest copy known, and the $12,000 PR 1 reads population 1 with 2 higher. The other VG-EX 4 carries a much older cert number and has never been offered in public.

A population this small does not price by grade. The PR 1 and the VG-EX 4 sold three grade steps apart and $24,600 apart, but the gap is the auction, not the condition: one bid in a February 2023 sale against 32 bids in June 2026. With three copies that have never been offered, the next one to surface sets the price on its own.

The NBA debut takes most of the Kareem debut money on two sales

Sixteen graded tickets labelled as one of his debuts have sold in public, $72,690 in all. The two Bucks stubs are 67% of that. The Lakers debut, which has sold seven times to the Bucks stub's two, has brought $11,047, and no single copy has passed $4,500. The UCLA tickets, five sales, add $8,063.

The other Kareem debuts collectors buy, and what each one is

None of these is the professional debut. Each is a first of some kind, each is catalogued by PSA, and each has sold more often than the Bucks stub has.

The Lakers debut is where the autograph does the work. The three highest prices, $4,500, $2,461 and $1,500, are all PR 1 or FR 1.5 stubs carrying a PSA/DNA 10 signature; the one unsigned PR 1 to sell brought $366 in June 2025. On the Bucks stub neither buyer paid for ink, and no signed copy of the game has sold.

The UCLA tickets split the same way the 1969 ones do. The real freshman debut against Orange Coast has one graded copy and one sale. The 27 November 1965 freshman-varsity scrimmage, a preseason exhibition, has ten graded copies and is the one that comes up for sale, at $890 to $2,247. Read the PSA label for the date before treating either as the first game.

What to pay, and what to type

A Kareem Abdul-Jabbar debut ticket in the strict sense is the Lew Alcindor Bucks stub, five graded copies, two sales, $12,000 and $36,600, the higher of them a 2026 result on a copy tied for finest known. The three copies that have never sold are the only supply there is until PSA grades a sixth, and the full ticket has never been graded at all. Anything else labelled a debut is a second team, a scrimmage, an exhibition or a college game, priced from $366 to $4,500 and carried by the autograph when it is high.