NBA Top Shot (official site), the collecting game based on officially licensed NBA Moments, is changing how it prices the Moments players give up in trade-in auctions. Until now, a Moment’s bid value was the average of its edition’s last 10 sales. Starting with the next trade-in auction, it will be the median price of the edition’s recent sales.
Trade-in auctions let players bid using Moments they already hold, with a larger prize on offer: a Case, a Box or a bundle of Tip-Off Packs, for example. Every Moment a player commits has a bid value, and the highest bids win, which gives collectors with the biggest holdings the best chance. Top Shot says it has been reviewing how bid value was calculated, and the new formula is its answer.
How the new bid value is calculated
Top Shot takes an edition’s sales from the past 30 days, or its last 10 sales if that gives a bigger sample. Any sale more than a year old is dropped. The remaining sales are sorted from cheapest to most expensive, and the one in the middle sets the bid value. If there’s an even number of sales, the two in the middle are averaged.
There are two filters. If a single collector bought several Moments from one edition, only their most recent purchase counts, which stops one buyer from setting the value for everybody. Moments sold back to Top Shot through buybacks don’t count at all.
Every Moment in an edition still shares one bid value, as it did before. That includes #1 serials, jersey-number serials and last serials.
Why Top Shot moved away from the average
With the old method, a single large sale could move the value of an entire edition. Top Shot’s example: Moments in an edition sell for between $22 and $30, and then a buyer pays $750 for the #1 serial. Under the old formula, that one sale pushed the 10-sale average to $98, so each Moment in the edition had a $98 bid value. Take the median of those same sales and you get $26, in line with where the edition really trades. The #1 serial still sold for $750, but that sale no longer decides the bid value for the rest of the edition.
Editions with little trading had a similar issue. One sale from years back could go on setting their value long after it happened. Top Shot says that was unfair to collectors bidding against those Moments.
Top Shot ran the new formula against actual sales from 2026. It says the results were much closer to the prices Moments sold for next, and they stayed stable when an odd sale went through. Editions that trade often should see bid values close to their old levels. Other editions may move up or down to reflect current sales.
What changes for players
Each trade-in auction now lists the bid value of every Moment, and players can sort and filter by it before they commit. Bid value isn’t shown on Moment pages or in a player’s collection, since it is calculated for each auction separately and only applies within that auction.
- Bid value is separate from the marketplace average sale price, which remains the average of an edition’s last 10 sales.
- If a Moment’s edition has no qualifying sales, it has no bid value in that auction and can’t be committed. When the edition sells again, it will get a bid value in the next trade-in auction.
- Bid values are fixed when an auction opens and stay the same until it ends.
- Leaderboards are unchanged.
Testing comes first
Top Shot is treating the new bid value as a trial and will watch how it performs. Before the main Rookie Debut auctions return, a smaller stress test auction will check that everything runs correctly under the new formula. Top Shot hasn’t released details of that test yet. The team is collecting feedback on Discord and X. It says any changes will be announced before they take effect and will only cover auctions that open after the change.