Trae Young’s Puzzling Prizm Silver PSA 10 Market
Is there any market harder to figure out right now than Trae Young? Since Jan 1, his Prizm Silver RC PSA 10 auctions have been all over the place. The average sale has been $444, but the standard deviation has been plus/minus $31 per sale, meaning there’s a 7% variation in each sale price from the average. What can we attribute this to?
It’s no secret that Trae Young is putting up massive numbers this year: 29.2 points per game, 9 assists per game, and 4.6 rebounds per game while shooting 37.1% from 3 on 9.3 attempts per game. He’s the only player in the NBA in the top 3 for both points per game and assists per game on the season.
To speak towards the volatile sales, we can look at his last 5 games which pretty much sums it up. 1/18 versus the Pistons: 16 points on 37.5% shooting. 1/20 versus the Raptors: 42 points on 55% shooting. 1/24 versus the Thunder: 26 points on 35% shooting. 1/26 versus the Wizards: 45 points on 54.2% shooting. 1/28 versus the Raptors: 18 points on 38.5% shooting. An important note is that over his last 4 games, he’s averaged 14.5 assists per game.
You may be wondering how Trae’s market is so low, when his season numbers are some of the best of all-time for a 2nd year player. Well, get this. @slabstoxsam did some research and compared Trae’s 2nd year to Kobe’s 2nd year, Trae’s usage rate is 8 percentage points higher than Kobe’s (35% to 27%). Because of that, he’s averaging 11 to 12 more FGs, FTs, or TOs per 48 minutes than Kobe did in his 2nd year. What does this mean? That if Trae was on a better team that didn’t have so many possessions due to poor defense, we may not see as big of statistical outputs. To hear the full breakdown on those numbers, be sure to listen to Sam’s podcast later today.
This isn’t to say that Trae is a bad investment, as he’s an extremely exciting young player. It’s just pointing out Trae needs to be on a winning team for us to really see his worth and have his cards go up big time. Will that ever happen? Time will tell. For now, we can keep being blown away by these monster stat lines.
