NBA Top Shot (official site), the collecting game built around officially licensed NBA Moments, is changing how it values the Moments players hand over in trade-in auctions. From the next trade-in auction, a Moment’s bid value will be the median price of its edition’s recent sales. Before, it was the average of the last 10 sales.
In a trade-in auction, players bid with Moments they already own. The prize is something bigger, such as a Case, a Box or a stack of Tip-Off Packs. Each committed Moment carries a bid value and the top bids win, so the people with the largest collections have the best odds. Top Shot says the way bid value was set has been under review, and the new formula is its fix.
How the new bid value is worked out
The calculation uses an edition’s sales from the last 30 days, or its last 10 sales if that is a larger number. Sales older than one year are ignored. Those sales are ranked from lowest to highest and the middle one becomes the bid value. When the count is even, the two middle sales are averaged.
Two filters apply. When one collector buys several Moments from the same edition, only their latest purchase is counted, so one buyer can’t set the value for everyone else. Moments sold back to Top Shot through buybacks are left out entirely.
As before, every Moment in an edition gets the same bid value. That covers #1 serials, jersey-number serials and last serials too.
Why the average was dropped
Under the old system, one big sale could shift the value of every Moment in an edition. Top Shot gives this example: an edition’s Moments trade between $22 and $30, then someone buys the #1 serial for $750. With the old formula, that sale lifted the 10-sale average to $98, and every Moment in the edition carried a $98 bid value. The median of the same sales comes out at $26, which is where the edition actually trades. The #1 still sold for $750, but that price no longer sets the bid value for the whole edition.
Editions that rarely trade had a related problem. A single sale from years earlier could keep setting their value long afterward. Top Shot says this was unfair to the collectors bidding against those Moments.
Top Shot tested the new formula against real sales from 2026. It says the values came out much closer to what Moments sold for next, and they held steady when an unusual sale came through. For editions that trade often, bid value should stay close to where it was. For other editions it may go up or down to match current sales.
What players will see
Every trade-in auction now shows each Moment’s bid value, and players can sort and filter by it before committing anything. Bid value doesn’t appear on Moment pages or in a player’s collection, because it is set separately for each auction and only counts inside that auction.
- Bid value is not the same as the marketplace average sale price. The marketplace figure is still the average of the edition’s last 10 sales.
- A Moment whose edition has no qualifying sales gets no bid value in that auction and can’t be committed. Once the edition sells again, it will have a bid value in the next trade-in auction.
- Bid values are locked when an auction opens and don’t change while it runs.
- Leaderboards work the same way as before.
A trial run first
The new bid value is being run as a trial while Top Shot monitors it. A smaller stress test auction will come before the main Rookie Debut auctions resume, to check that everything works under the new formula. Top Shot hasn’t shared details of that test yet. The team is taking feedback on Discord and X, and says any adjustment will be announced before it takes effect and will only apply to auctions that open after the change.
