This Week on NBA Top Shot: News and Notes from January 8-14
by Chris Otis
1/14/2022
Welcome back to This Week on NBA Top Shot, a weekly blog from Otis Top Shot and your friends here at MomentRanks that’ll dive into each week’s essential NBA Top Shot news and updates. Pack drops, Flash Challenges, marketplace insights, noteworthy sales, community news; we’ve got you covered on all of it and more.
Everything that happens on Top Shot can be a lot to keep up with — but you’ll be able to find it all here every week. Let’s recap how Top Shot followed up a blazing start to the new year.
tl;dr: This Week on NBA Top Shot
One of the most anticipated pack drops of the season, and five Flash Challenges — including one celebrating the return of Golden State Warriors sharpshooting superstar Klay Thompson — made for an epic week that played out at a blistering pace. Let’s first take a look at how the market reacted to all this excitement before diving deeper into the events that made this past week special.
Top Shot Market Update
Flash Challenges once again ruled the Top Shot ecosystem this week, leading to more of the healthy growth and good vibes in the community that we’ve seen over the past few weeks. It’s hard to know just how much of this growth is sustained by actual Flash Challenge speculation and bottlenecks, as opposed to resulting from the overall positive sentiment leading to more purchases and less listing/undercutting. But either way, things are still looking quite good for the Top Shot market to start out the new year.
Top Shot Marketplace Metrics
Taking a look at the MomentRanks Marketplace Dashboard, the Total Market Cap saw a continuation of the steady, sustained growth that started back in mid-December, and sits about $30M higher than it did one week ago at this time. Hourly and daily fluctuations occur, but the overall trend is still very much heading in a positive direction. The MR100 metric, on the other hand, sort of plateaued this week, with the current value (2293.84 as of 3 AM EST on 1/14) remaining just about where it was a week ago.
Looking at the 24-hours sales volume metrics, we can see the daily effect that the presence of Challenges has on the marketplace. This was especially pronounced in the final 24 hours of the Flash Challenge celebrating Klay’s return and the start of the first Hustle and Show Showcase Challenge.
The combined effect of both created a peak of nearly 140,000 transactions in the 24-hour period preceding 5 p.m. EST on January 12, the highest figure seen since June, and second highest since MomentRanks began tracking 24-hours sales at the end of April 2021.
Top Sales on Top Shot This Week
The top five sales of the week were a hodgepodge of superstar Legendary S1 and S2 Moments and a Kevin Durant Run It Back. The top spot came on Friday morning, as Jonathan Bales purchased a LeBron James S1 Legendary that will be given away on Club Top Shot next week.
The From the Top Legendary iteration of Steph’s Top Shot Debut Moment got the second spot with a $27,500 sale. This is the second highest sale ever for this Moment, and only the fifth sale of the last six months. Durant’s RIB and S2 Holo Icon, LeBron’s S2 Deck the Hoops, and Steph Curry’s S2 Deck the Hoops round out this week’s star-studded top sales.
Top Shot Pack Drops
After a week without any pack drops to start the new year, the first drop of the beloved Hustle and Show set was released this past Tuesday. The rest of the month should see some more intriguing and exciting drops as well, which I’ll talk about a bit later on.
Hustle and Show (Drop 1)
The NBA Top Shot community loves the Hustle and Show set. It embodies so much of what makes basketball great, and showcases the plays that make us fall in love with our favorite teams and players. Thankfully, Top Shot brought this fan favorite back for Series 3, and the first of its two planned Hustle and Show drops did not disappoint.
With a wonderful mix of hard-nosed role players hustling to the max and the flashiest showstoppers making highlight-reel plays across 10 Moments, this really is a vibrant set that truly displays the NBA’s unparalleled swagger and excellence.
As a Celtics fan, my personal favorite Moment in the set so far has to be Marcus Smart diving for a loose ball before setting up Jayson Tatum with a nice outlet pass that leads to an easy dunk in transition. Trail Blazers rookie Greg Brown III throwing down an Eastbay dunk in-game seems to be the community’s favorite so far. GB3 is actually newsworthy for another reason this week as well — more on that later on.
Locker Pack (Release 7)
Supplies are quickly dwindling for the latest version of the Locker Pack, which sees S2 and S3 Base Moments mixed together from TheLockerRoom account; if you’re interested in taking a shot at this one, you may only have a day or two left to do so.
This Week in Top Shot Challenges
As has been the case for the past couple months, Challenges were king once again in the Top Shot universe this week. In recent weeks, Top Shot’s front-facing leadership has often alluded to the fact that Flash Challenges are going to continue coming on a near daily-basis, and so far that has proven to very much be the case. Here’s a look back at the Challenges that kept us on our toes all week.
Showcase Challenges
The first of two Showcase Challenges lined up for this drop of Hustle and Show features a Kristaps Porzingis reward that truly epitomizes the essence of this set; KP casually sends back James Harden’s floater attempt at one end before gathering the ball, running the floor, and tossing a lob to teammate Tim Hardaway Jr., who promptly slams the ball home.
The second Showcase Challenge, which will go live after the first one ends, features a Steph Curry Hustle and Show Moment.
Flash Challenges
As mentioned above, five Flash Challenges went live throughout this past week, including a collaboration with one of the NBA’s top rookies in Evan Mobley, and a celebration of the return of Splash Brother #2, Klay Thompson, after nearly three calendar years away from the game. Let’s quickly run through them all here.
Lead The Way required collectors to create a showcase with the leading scorer from each of the nine games that took place on January 7. The prize for all who completed the challenge was an Archive Set Pack.
The Return, arguably the most special Flash Challenge done to date, required collectors to make a showcase that included 1 Klay Thompson Vintage Vibes or Deck The Hoops Moment, 3 Rare or Legendary 3-pointer Moments, and 5 Moments that included one of each of the top five leaders in made 3-pointers from the NBA games played on January 9. The reward, of course, was a Klay MSFE Moment from his return to action.
A nice surprise for holders of the Archive and Run It Back sets, Flashback was a two-tiered Flash Challenge that required the use of throwback Moments. For the easy track, the showcase included Moments from the top three leading scorers in games on January 10, as well as seven additional Archive Set Moments — one from each of the winning teams that night.
The hard track required the same, except the three leading scorers’ Moments needed to be Rare or Legendary, and the seven additional Moments from the winning teams had to be from either Run It Back set. The easy track appropriately rewarded collectors with an Archive Set pack, whereas the hard track’s reward was a Rare S2 pack.
Pass The Rock was another two-tiered Flash Challenge. The easy track rewarded collectors with a Donovan Mitchell MSFE Moment and required a showcase that included five Moments, one from each player who was first to reach five assists in the games played on January 12. The hard track required the same, except that each Moment had to come from the Rare, Legendary, or Fandom tiers, and rewarded collectors with an S2 rare pack.
Finally, Clog The Paint saw Top Shot collaborate with Cleveland’s star rookie big man Evan Mobley to reward collectors with a new MSFE Moment of his. The Challenge required users to create a showcase including Moments from each of the top 10 leaders in combined blocks and rebounds from all the NBA action on January 13. This challenge wound up creating some of the most egregious examples of bottleneck speculation seen on the platform yet, with the Moments of some rather pedestrian players skyrocketing to prices reminiscent of last February.
Jarred Vanderbilt wound up in the top 10, and his only Moment on the platform — an S2 Base Set Moment —now sits at a low ask of $299 after fluctuating around $30 for the past month or so.
Top Shot Community Updates
Some other things from the Top Shot community to note from this week include:
- MomentRanks’ own Clegainz on-boarded Greg Brown III to Top Shot after GB3 responded to a Shot Talkin’ clip on Twitter where his H&S Moment was put in the S-Tier of the H&S Set. The Top Shot community then welcomed him by flooding his new account with gifted Moments. Watch the full show below:
- The Hustlin’ Showroom collector community and its founder, Mint Juice, were featured on the official Top Shot blog before the H&S drop.
- Two separate Top Shot collector fan groups, one led by Packrip Ewing and my old friends at NF3 Media in New York and another by a contingent of Portland-area Top Shot collectors (Rip Packs City), made their way to NBA games this past week, and gave us all some great examples of the potential that this incredible platform and community has to bring fans together and forge lasting friendships.
The Week Ahead on Top Shot
If the past couple weeks have been any indication, the next seven days will continue to see Flash Challenges come at a frenetic pace that will surely keep us all engaged on a daily basis. Make sure you tune into the Top Shot Twitter account and blog a couple times a day so you don’t miss out!
In addition, as mentioned above, there’ll be one more Hustle and Show Showcase Challenge for this drop, which will feature a Steph Curry reward.
On Tuesday, January 18, the seventh release of the Series 3 Base Set will take place, with 150,000 packs being made available for purchase. Standard rules apply: a maximum of five packs per purchase and 10 packs allowed total per collector at $9 a piece. 17 new Moments will be in these packs including the much anticipated three-star Jalen Green TS Debut, Lance Stephenson’s Top Shot Debut after his unexpected return to Indiana, and Kevin Durant’s first appearance in the Series 3 Base Set.
Looking beyond this week and into the rest of January, we should be seeing the first Holo Icon drop at some point in January, as noted here by Shot Talkin’. Perhaps some news about when exactly that drop is going to happen will come at some point in the next week. I’d imagine we’ll see at least one more other non-Base Set drop this month as well, perhaps one of the curated sets that the S3 roadmap mentions, or one of the sets containing players from a specific geographic region. We’ll see!
In any case, that’s it for this week everyone. See you all back here next Friday!