A ten million dollar floor
Anyone who wants the shirt Michael Jordan wore on 7 June 1998 needs to clear ten million dollars by 15 September. That is the estimated starting point set by auction house Joopiter, which will run the sale, according to The Athletic.
The item is the white Chicago Bulls jersey from Game 3 of the 1998 NBA Finals against the Utah Jazz. Chicago won 96-54 at the United Center to take a 2-1 lead in the series, and Jordan produced a game-high 24 points in 32 minutes.
The scoreline itself is part of the appeal. That 42-point margin is still the widest in Finals history, and Utah’s 54 points remain the fewest any team has managed in a Finals game since the shot clock came in.
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Why the estimate starts so high
Joopiter’s figure is anchored to a precedent from the same week of basketball. Jordan’s Game 1 jersey sold for $10.1 million in 2022 and still holds the record for the most expensive piece of game-worn sports memorabilia ever sold. The market for that kind of item has climbed a long way since.
Scarcity does the rest of the work.
“Jordan remains a very, very, very rare relic, certainly in comparison to the GOATs of today, the LeBrons, the Stephen Currys, because it was a different era,” Barry Meisel, founder of memorabilia company MeiGray, told The Athletic. “There were no game-worn jersey programs. Teams weren’t putting a jersey on a player’s back every game or every couple of games.”
The 1998 run carries a weight the other five titles do not. It closed an eight-year span in which Jordan won six championships with the Bulls, and it was the final season he, Scottie Pippen and that core played together in Chicago. The nickname attached to that campaign has since become shorthand for the whole era, and anything stamped with it trades in a bracket of its own.
Jordan retired afterwards, stayed away for three years, then came back in 2001 for two seasons with the Washington Wizards. Nothing from that spell moves at these prices.
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