1986-87 Fleer Dominique Wilkins #121

the card

notes

On 10 April 1986, Dominique Wilkins scored 57 points against New Jersey and took the NBA scoring title by three tenths of a point, finishing at 30.3 a game ahead of Adrian Dantley at 29.83 and Alex English at 29.8. Five months later, Fleer issued his rookie card.

He was in his fifth NBA season. Utah had taken him third overall in 1982, behind James Worthy and Terry Cummings, and then traded him to Atlanta for John Drew, Freeman Williams and a million dollars, because Wilkins would not play in Utah and the Jazz needed cash. He averaged 17.5 as a rookie in 1982-83 and had not finished a season below 20 since.

None of that appears on a card until 1986, because between 1981-82 Topps and this set there was nothing to appear on.

The scoring race is a small monument to how deep this checklist runs. All three men in it are in these 132 cards - Wilkins at 121, Dantley at 21, English at 30

• and all three are in the Hall of Fame. So are the two players drafted ahead

of him in 1982, Worthy at 131 and Cummings at 20.

He was the Human Highlight Film by then, a name earned at Georgia and made literal at the 1985 Slam Dunk Contest, which he won. Two years after this card he lost the 1988 contest to Michael Jordan in Chicago, on Jordan's free throw line dunk, in what is still the argument people have about dunk contests.

The population is worth reading beside card 57. Wilkins has 94 PSA 10s against Jordan's 335, which reads as the scarcer card until you look at the rate: 1.20 per cent of graded Wilkins are gem, and 1.19 per cent of graded Jordans. The two cards are exactly as hard to find perfect. There are simply four times fewer Wilkins submitted, because nobody pays to grade a beaten one.

So for anyone assembling this set in PSA 10, the Wilkins is the harder card to buy and the Jordan is the harder card to afford. Those are different problems.

One number stands out on its own. 352 copies carry a qualifier, four and a half per cent of everything graded, and most of them sit at 8 and 9 - 159 and 174 respectively. A qualifier at those grades is usually centring: a card that would have been a 9 but for how it was cut.

population

PSA

graded elsewhere

recorded 29 aug 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

Cheap in every grade below 9, and that is the whole opportunity here.

PSA 7 and 8 together account for nearly five thousand copies and trade in the low hundreds or less. It is the same photograph, the same cardboard and the same rookie card as the ones costing thousands. If you want the card rather than the grade, this is where to buy it.

PSA 9 is where the price starts moving. PSA 10, with 94 copies, is a registry card and priced accordingly.

Counterfeiting is a much smaller concern than on card 57 - fakes from this set concentrate on Jordan and Barkley - but it is not zero, and the safest habit is the same one: verify the certificate number with the grading company rather than trusting the holder.

Watch for qualifiers on graded copies. With 352 of them in circulation you will meet one, and an 8(OC) is not an 8.

what to check before you buy

Read the label for a qualifier before you read the number. OC, MC and ST appear on 352 graded copies of this card, clustered at the grades people actually buy. They trade well below a clean card at the same grade and the difference is easy to miss at a glance.

Check centering on both sides. It is the most common reason this card grades below expectation, and it is why so many of those qualifiers exist.

Check the red, white and blue border on all four edges. Colour runs to the edge on every side of a 1986 Fleer card, so any chip or nick shows immediately.

On a raw card, look at print quality. Genuine cards are crisp and dark; counterfeits from this set tend to be fuzzy and misaligned. But do not buy an expensive raw copy on that basis alone - published tells get incorporated into newer fakes.

sources