1986-87 Fleer Alvan Adams #2

the card

notes

Alvan Adams has fewer PSA 10s than any other card in the 1986-87 Fleer set. Seventy-seven, against 335 for the Jordan.

He is not the hardest card in it. That is the distinction worth making on this page, because the two get confused constantly.

PSA has graded 2,905 copies of card 2 and 77 are PSA 10 - a gem rate of 2.65 per cent. Fourteen cards in the set gem less often, including every headline name: the Jordan at 1.19, the Bird at 1.50, the Kareem at 1.59 sitting directly before it at card 1, the Ewing at 1.63 and the Mullin at 1.80.

So Adams has the lowest ten count in the set because 2,905 people submitted him, not because the card resists grading. The Jordan has been submitted 28,151 times. Send ten times as many cards and you will get more tens even from a harder card. We wrote that up across all 132 in the ten hardest cards in this set.

Who he was

Phoenix took Adams fourth overall in 1975 and he won Rookie of the Year, made the All-Star team in the same season, and took the Suns to the Finals - where game five against Boston went to triple overtime and is still argued about as the best game ever played.

He stayed thirteen years, all of them in Phoenix, and retired as the franchise leader in games, points, rebounds, assists and steals. Several of those records still stand.

Every ten of this card is a PSA ten

Beckett has recorded 372 copies and its published gem rate is 9.1 per cent, which would make it three times more generous than PSA. It is not. All 34 of those gems are 9.5s - Beckett has never awarded this card a Pristine 10 or a Black Label.

SGC has 169 copies with three at 9.5 and no ten. CGC has 61 and its best is a 9.

So across 602 copies at the other three companies, not one ten exists. All 77 are in PSA holders, which is the same pattern this site found on the Glenn Anderson, where Beckett published 21.1 per cent and had awarded nothing.

Two PSA 10s, fourteen days apart, one house

Thirteen sales are on record and seven of them are PSA 10s. Two of those seven sold at Goldin in November 2022, two weeks apart.

The first made $3,660 on the 5th. The second made $1,320 on the 19th. Different certificates, so two separate cards, at the same grade in the same room inside a fortnight, and one made 2.8 times the other.

Nothing in the population explains that. It is what a thin market looks like: seventy-seven cards, a handful of buyers, and whoever happens to be in the room on the night.

The seven results run $2,520 in May 2021, $3,660 and $1,320 in November 2022, $4,920 in March 2024, $3,203 that August, $3,050 in March 2025 and $7,320 in May 2026. The last of those is the highest recorded.

And then there is the drop to PSA 9

A PSA 9 made $252 at Fanatics Collect in August 2026, three months after a PSA 10 made $7,320. Twenty-nine times the money for one grade.

The other PSA 9s sold at $151 and $171. PSA 8s made $23 and $28. A PSA 7 made $15.

There are 782 PSA 9s of this card against 77 tens, and the price gap between them is wider than the population gap by a long way.

population

PSA

graded elsewhere

recorded 01 oct 2026. figures are a snapshot on that date, not a live count.

recorded sales

dated past results, not an estimate of what a copy is worth today. figures published by an auction house normally include the buyer's premium, so they are more than the seller received.

where to buy one

PSA 8 or 9 is the card. There are 1,168 eights and 782 nines, recorded sales run from $23 to $252, and it is the same photograph the expensive ones carry.

PSA 10 is a different object entirely. Seventy-seven exist and seven have sold publicly between $1,320 and $7,320 - a spread of five and a half times on the same grade, including two sales a fortnight apart that differed by 2.8 times.

Treat any single PSA 10 figure with caution here. The market is thin enough that one result tells you about one night.

Do not read Beckett's 9.1 per cent gem rate as a count of tens. Beckett has never awarded this card a ten; all 34 are 9.5s. The same is true of SGC and CGC, neither of which has gone above 9.5.

If you want a ten of this card it has to be PSA.

At 2.65 per cent you should expect about one ten in every thirty-eight raw cards submitted - better odds than most of this set's famous cards and still poor.

Counterfeiting in this set concentrates on the Jordan and the Barkley. No fakes of this card are documented.

what to check before you buy

Check centring on both sides. It is the usual reason a 1986 Fleer card grades below expectation.

Read the red, white and blue border along all four edges. Colour runs to the edge on every side, so a chip shows immediately as white.

Look for print snow and surface specks under angled light. They are common across the set and are usually what separates a 9 from a 10.

Check the back for gum residue or wax staining. Packs held twelve cards, one sticker and a stick of gum, and the gum sat against the top card of the stack.

Read the label for a qualifier before you read the grade.

If the label says Beckett, SGC or CGC, the word gem does not mean a ten on this card. None of the three has ever awarded one.

sources