1986-87 Fleer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar #1

the card

notes

Card 1 of the set that made everybody else famous belongs to a man who was thirty-nine years old and had been in the league since 1969.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was in his seventeenth NBA season when Fleer printed this. He had six Most Valuable Player awards - still more than anyone - and he would retire in 1989 as the leading scorer in the history of the sport, a record that stood until LeBron James passed him in February 2023.

He is card 1 in a set famous for rookies. Jordan, Barkley, Olajuwon, Ewing and Karl Malone are all in here because nobody had printed a mainstream basketball card since 1981, so five years of arrivals landed at once. Kareem had been on cardboard for seventeen years by then.

That contrast is the whole character of the set, and it is worth reading the numbers with it in mind.

PSA has graded 6,157 copies and 98 are PSA 10. The gem rate is 1.59 per cent, which makes this the fifth hardest card of the 132 to find perfect - behind the Jordan at 1.19, the Dominique Wilkins at 1.20, the Larry Bird at 1.50 and the Johnny Moore at 1.54.

Card 1, and a pattern that does not appear here

Elsewhere on this site, card 1 of a set is reliably the worst preserved card in it. The 1952 Topps Andy Pafko has sixty-one per cent of its graded population at PSA 3 or lower against eighteen per cent for the rest of the set. The 1977 Topps Luke Skywalker gems at 0.17 per cent against a series average of 2.33. The 1940 Superman card 1 is the most graded and least preserved card in its set.

This card does not do that. At 1.59 per cent it sits in the normal range for the set's better-known cards, close to the Bird at 1.50 and the Ewing at 1.63, and four cards are harder.

We do not know why the pattern breaks here, and we would rather say so than invent a reason. The explanation usually offered for card 1 - that a collector sorted his cards into numerical order and put a rubber band round the stack, leaving card 1 facing outward - describes a habit rather than a law, and habits change. By 1986 collectors had sleeves and binder pages. That would account for it, and we have no evidence beyond the fact that the effect is absent.

Across the four graders

Beckett has recorded 1,060 copies and one at its Pristine 10 level, with forty-eight more at 9.5. SGC has 830 with three tens. CGC has 144 with one.

So PSA holds 98 of the 103 gem copies recorded anywhere, which is roughly the ratio this site finds on every card from this set.

The sales

Six PSA 10s have sold publicly at Heritage, and the certificate numbers are all different, so these are six separate cards rather than one changing hands repeatedly.

They made $9,300 in May 2022, $8,700 that September, $5,280 in May 2023, $3,720 that July, $7,500 in March 2024 and $5,246 in May 2026.

That is a spread of two and a half times. It is also one of the few cards on this site where the direction is downward - the most recent sale is forty-four per cent below the earliest, four years apart, with a $7,500 result in between to keep anyone from calling it a trend.

Ninety-eight PSA 10s is enough supply that no single sale sets a level, and the record shows it.

population

PSA

graded elsewhere

recorded 07 sep 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

This is one of the cheapest ways to own a PSA 10 of an all-time great, and the reason is supply rather than any judgement about Kareem.

Ninety-eight exist. Six have sold publicly between $3,720 and $9,300, and the last of them made $5,246 in May 2026. Anyone quoting one figure is describing one afternoon.

PSA 9, at 979 copies, is common and inexpensive. PSA 8 at 2,278 is the largest single grade in the population and costs very little. If you want the card rather than the grade, that is where it lives, and it is the same photograph.

Note which company graded it. Beckett has recorded one card at Pristine 10 and forty-eight at 9.5, and a BGS 9.5 is not the equivalent of a PSA 10 in price. SGC has three tens, CGC one.

At a 1.59 per cent gem rate you should expect roughly one 10 in every sixty-three raw cards submitted, which makes this the fifth hardest card in the set to gem and a poor bet for speculative grading.

Counterfeiting in this set concentrates on the Jordan and the Barkley. No fakes of this card are documented, which lowers the risk without removing the sense in checking a certificate before paying four figures.

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 usually what separates a 9 from a 10 on a card that otherwise looks clean.

Do not assume card 1 has been abused. On most sets it has, and on this one the population says otherwise - judge the copy in front of you rather than the number on it.

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

On raw cards genuine printing is crisp and dark. Fuzzy or misaligned printing is a warning, though use it as a first filter rather than a verdict - published tells get built into later fakes.

sources