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Michael Jordan's jersey from Game 3 of the 1998 NBA Finals will be auctioned next month with a presale estimate of $10 million to $15 million, which would make it the most expensive basketball jersey ever sold.
JOOPITER, the auction house Pharrell Williams founded, opens bidding at 10 a.m. New York time on Sept. 15 and will run the sale globally until Sept. 29. The auction is titled Driven to Greatness. The jersey goes on view at 16 Morton Street in New York from Sept. 15 to 20 and at Canon Collectibles in Los Angeles from Sept. 21 to 26.
Jordan scored 24 points in 32 minutes wearing it on June 7, 1998, as the Chicago Bulls beat the Utah Jazz 96-54. The 42-point margin is the widest in Finals history. Five of the six games in that series were decided by five points or fewer.
The record it would break is Jordan's own. Sotheby's sold his Game 1 jersey from the same series for $10.091 million in September 2022, when 20 bids pushed the price to double the $5 million estimate. That sale set marks for a basketball jersey, for game-worn sports memorabilia of any kind and for Jordan memorabilia, displacing Diego Maradona's Hand of God shirt from the 1986 World Cup, which had gone for $9.28 million four months earlier.
One piece of game-worn memorabilia has sold higher since. Babe Ruth's jersey from the 1932 World Series, worn for the at-bat known as the called shot, reached $24.1 million in 2024.
"Driven to Greatness is about the spirit of someone who changed the way the world saw what was possible in basketball and in sports in general," Williams said. "The Last Dance is a piece of history you can hold and is a reminder that the extraordinary can transcend the ordinary."
Jordan won his sixth championship in Game 6 of that series, hitting the winning shot in his final game for the Bulls. The 1998 Finals remain the most-watched in league history, and demand for memorabilia from that season climbed after ESPN and Netflix released The Last Dance in 2020.
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