1986-87 Fleer Patrick Ewing #32

the card

notes

Patrick Ewing is in this set because of a glass drum and seven envelopes.

Before 1985 the NBA settled its first pick with a coin flip between the worst team in each conference, which rewarded losing so plainly that the Board of Governors changed it. The replacement was a lottery: every non-playoff team in, equal odds, envelopes drawn on television.

The timing was not accidental. The 1985 draft had an obvious prize in Ewing, who had taken Georgetown to three national finals in four years and won one. The New York Knicks won the first lottery ever held and took him first overall.

People have been arguing about that draw ever since. The frozen-envelope theory - that the Knicks' envelope was chilled, or creased, so David Stern could find it by touch - is the most durable conspiracy theory in American sport, and it rests on a television picture of a bent corner and on the league's obvious interest in a strong team in New York. Nothing has ever been established. It is a story about what people believe rather than about what happened, and it is the reason this card carries more weight than a rookie-of-the-year card usually would.

Ewing won Rookie of the Year for 1985-86, the season before Fleer printed this. He made eleven All-Star teams, played 1,183 games, went into the Hall of Fame in 2008, and never won a championship.

Card 32, in a set full of first cards

This is his rookie card, because nobody printed a mainstream basketball set between 1981-82 Topps and this one. Five years of arrivals landed at once, which is why Ewing sits in the same 132-card issue as Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Akeem Olajuwon and Karl Malone.

Malone went thirteenth in that same 1985 draft. Both men's first cards are in here, printed a year apart from their debuts.

What PSA has recorded

Read on 27 August 2026. PSA has graded 9,921 copies of this card and 162 are PSA 10 - a gem rate of 1.63 per cent.

Of the 133 cards PSA lists for this set, only five gem less often: the Jordan at 1.19, the Wilkins at 1.20, the Bird at 1.50, the Moore at 1.54 and the Kareem at 1.59.

So this is the sixth hardest card in the set to find perfect, and it has been submitted more often than all but a handful of them.

The shape of the population is the usual one for this issue. It piles up at PSA 8 with 4,121 copies and at PSA 7 with 2,155, then thins fast: 1,853 at 9 and 162 at 10. Centring and the red, white and blue border running to all four edges are why.

Seven copies came back Authentic with no numeric grade.

The other three graders, and the widest split we have found

Beckett has recorded 2,193 copies of this card. Exactly one is a Pristine 10, and eighty-five more are 9.5.

Add those together, as aggregators do, and Beckett reports eighty-six gems at 3.9 per cent against PSA's 1.5. That reading makes Beckett look more than twice as generous.

Tens against tens it is the reverse, and not narrowly. Beckett has awarded one 10 in 2,193 copies - 0.05 per cent - against PSA's 1.63. On this card PSA is more than thirty times likelier to award a ten.

SGC has 1,421 copies with five tens, a rate of 0.35 per cent. CGC has 205 with one, at 0.49.

So of the 169 cards recorded at ten across all four companies, 162 are in PSA holders. That is the most lopsided split on this site, and it is worth knowing before anyone pays a premium for a Beckett 9.5 on the strength of a gem-rate figure.

What fifty sales show

The sales table below runs from May 2021 to September 2026 and carries fifty results. That is the deepest record on this site, and it shows something the population figures cannot.

The two ends of this card have moved in opposite directions.

A PSA 10 made $5,520 in May 2021. By October 2024 one made $3,356, and five separate PSA 10s sold between March 2024 and May 2025 in a band from $3,356 to $3,965. Then in May 2026 one made $7,930 - more than double the trough, and more than any copy of this card has fetched in the period we have records for.

The PSA 8 did the opposite and kept going. Copies made $300 and $252 in 2021, $164 and $162 in January 2022, then $139, $134, $130 and $127 through 2023, and $121 and $110 in 2024. That is a decline of roughly two thirds while the top of the card doubled.

The PSA 9 sits between them, falling from $492 in March 2022 to $288 that August, recovering to $390 and $367 across 2025, then reaching $625 in September 2026.

So the common grades of this card have become cheaper over five years and the gem has become far more expensive. A single average across those fifty sales would describe neither.

One label needs explaining. The September 2022 entry reads SGC 92, which is not a typo. SGC graded on a 10-to-100 scale until August 2018, and 92 on that scale is NM/MT+, the equivalent of an 8.5. Cards graded before the change still carry the old number.

population

PSA

graded elsewhere

recorded 26 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

PSA 8 is where this card is bought, and it has got cheaper. There are 4,121 of them, it is the largest grade in the population by a distance, and recorded sales have fallen from around $300 in 2021 to around $110 in 2024.

PSA 9, at 1,853 copies, has traded between roughly $290 and $625 across the same period and is the sensible stretch for most buyers.

PSA 10 is a different market and has moved the other way. A hundred and sixty-two exist against 9,921 graded copies, and recorded sales run from $3,356 in October 2024 to $7,930 in May 2026. Nothing about the population changed in between.

At a 1.63 per cent gem rate you should expect roughly one 10 in every sixty-one raw cards submitted. That is poor odds for speculative grading and better than the Jordan's.

Read the label for a qualifier before you read the grade. Seven copies carry Authentic with no numeric grade.

Check which company graded it. On every other card from this set the top of the market sits overwhelmingly in PSA plastic, and a BGS 9.5 does not price like a PSA 10.

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 verifying a certificate.

what to check before you buy

Check centring on both sides. It is the usual reason a 1986 Fleer card grades below expectation and it is why this one gems at under two per cent.

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

Look for print snow and surface specks under angled light. They are common across the whole set and are usually what separates a 9 from a 10 on a card that otherwise looks clean.

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 an SGC card carries a two-digit number, that is the old 10-to-100 scale SGC used until August 2018 rather than a mistake. SGC 92 is an 8.5, SGC 96 a 9, SGC 98 a 10.

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