Basketball
Basketball Error Cards: What They Sell For
Basketball has plenty of error cards, and most of them come from the same two products: the first seasons of NBA Hoops and SkyBox, both of which have long lists of known mistakes. The honest news is that most of these errors are worth a few dollars. The useful news is that a few sell for many times their normal version — and a price guide will not always tell you which one you have.
Prices are SportsCardsPro sold-price figures in US dollars, read on September 28, 2026. SportsCardsPro is the sports-card side of PriceCharting.
1990-91 Hoops: no position on the front
On four cards in the 1990-91 Hoops set, the player’s position was left off the front before the mistake was fixed: Danny Ferry #406, Kenny Smith #414, Greg Grant #421 and Pervis Ellison #438. Collectors who track these rate every one of the error versions as very scarce, and note they were not made in equal numbers — corrected Ellison and Smith cards turn up in the same boxes as Ferry and Grant errors.
Here is why that matters to you. Price guides mostly do not split the two versions. SportsCardsPro’s Kenny Smith #414 page reads $1.99 ungraded — and its own sales list shows a copy sold as the missing-position version for $30.00 on June 20, 2026, next to ordinary copies selling for $1.49 and $1.99 that summer. The headline price is the common version’s. If you hold the error and price it off the headline, you give most of it away.
Check yours: look for the player’s position on the front. A normal copy shows it. If it is missing, you have the error; list it by that name, with a clear photo of the front.
The same set also has two cards found with a prototype stamp at the bottom of the back — Ron Harper #146 and Sedale Threatt #284 — which checklist keepers also mark as very scarce.
1990-91 SkyBox Dyron Nix #118: the wrong player on the back
SkyBox’s first set put the wrong photo on the back of a few cards. The best known is Dyron Nix: one version pictures Wayman Tisdale on the back instead of Nix. The error sells for $8.41 ungraded, against $1.13 for the normal card.
That is a real premium — more than seven times the normal card — on a very small number. A photo swap is also easy to prove: two pictures side by side settle it.
Check yours: flip it over. If the back photo is not the player named on the card, look the card number up in a checklist that lists errors and see whether it is a known version.
The bigger lever: condition
The 1990-91 Hoops Michael Jordan #65 is not an error card at all. It sells for $3.21 ungraded — and $1,224.46 in a PSA 10, with 872 copies graded that high. None of the errors above comes close to that jump. For cards like these, a sharp, well-centred copy is worth far more than a mistake is.
That is also what separates a real error from a misprint. A mistake in what wasprinted — a wrong photo, a missing line of text — can become its own card. A problem with how it was printed — off-centre, an ink smear, a rough cut — is just a flaw, and it lowers the grade.
Modern basketball: parallels and short prints, not mistakes
The versions most modern basketball collectors chase are planned ones: coloured and numbered parallels, and short-printed photo variations. Those are covered in basketball card parallels and short print. For a full checklist of what to look for on any card, see card errors and variations: how to spot them.
What this looks like on Waffles
Every basketball pack we sell is four real cards we physically hold, and the value we show for each card carries the date it was last set — so you can check any card you pull against a price guide yourself. See what is in the basketball packs right now and the published odds.