The supply has been closed longer than it was open

Nothing about their careers explains that gap. Both were first-round picks, both were All-Stars many times over, both are in the Hall of Fame. The variable is thirty-eight years of availability that one of them had and the other did not.

The comparison

Take the players of that era tracked here and line them up.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, born 1947, living: 79 items listed, from $120.
Julius Erving, born 1950, living: 123 items listed, from $50.
Larry Bird, born 1956, living: 153 items listed, from $149.
Pete Maravich, born 1947, died 1988: nothing listed at all, and the cheapest sale this index has recorded is $2,074.

Those are different measurements and the difference matters. Erving's $50 is somebody's asking price on a live listing. Maravich's $2,074 is a realised auction result, which is a stronger figure.

But that distinction does not account for a gap of forty times. And it does not explain the first column at all: three of those men have scores of items available on any given day and the fourth has none.

What the date did

He was drafted in 1970 and died on 5 January 1988. Call it eighteen years of being somebody you could get a signature from: ten NBA seasons, then eight years retired, doing a good deal of public speaking after a religious conversion, and inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1987, which put him back on the circuit for his final year.

Eighteen years open. Thirty-eight years closed, and counting.

The supply passed the point of having been shut for longer than it was ever open in 2006, and every year since has widened it.

Meanwhile his contemporaries kept going. A player who retired in 1980 and lived normally has now had another four and a half decades to sign at shows, through the post, at private signings and for card manufacturers. Abdul-Jabbar has signed for longer in retirement than Maravich was alive.

Three industries he missed

This is the part that makes an early death more consequential than the arithmetic alone suggests, because of exactly when 1988 falls.

He died before the signed insert card. The manufacturer autograph, signed in bulk under supervision and inserted into packs, became standard in the 1990s. That is the single largest source of modern certified basketball signatures, and none of his market comes from it.

He died before the private signing industry matured. The paid show circuit and the organised private signing, which is how most retired players of his generation produced the bulk of their signed material, scaled up after he was gone.

And he died before third-party authentication existed. PSA/DNA and its competitors arrived around a decade after his death. Every certification on a Maravich item is therefore retrospective: an expert examining a signature written years before anybody was authenticating them contemporaneously.

A player who lived through all three has a market with a deep, cheap base of modern material and a thin layer of scarce vintage on top. Maravich has only the vintage layer. There is no base.

That is why there is no such thing as an inexpensive certified Maravich, and why this index has no live listings for him at all.

And it is why his autograph grade matters

The absence of factory material has one more consequence, and it shows up clearly in what has sold.

On modern basketball signers the autograph grade explains almost nothing. Four of Shaquille O'Neal's debut tickets share an identical Auto 10 and span three and a half times in price. Allen Iverson's dearest result carries a card graded merely Authentic and outsold a 9.5 by four times. When thousands of signatures were written in one sitting under identical conditions, the grade has nothing to distinguish, and the price is set by which card it is.

Maravich runs the other way. Across the results recorded here, items with a numeric autograph grade average around $6,200. Items authenticated without a number average around $2,300.

The clearest case is one card appearing three times. The 1976 Topps number 60 sold at $4,800 graded EX 5 with an Auto 9, at $4,680 graded NM 7 with an Auto 8, and at $2,520 with no numeric grade on either.

The copy with the worse card and the better signature beat the copy with the better card and the worse one. Because each of his signatures was written by hand on a separate occasion, they genuinely differ, and the grade is measuring a real difference rather than a manufacturing tolerance.

What this means for a buyer

Three things.

There is no entry level and there will not be one. A comparable living player gives you a way in at fifty or a hundred dollars. His market starts where it starts, because the cheap material that would have been signed between 1988 and now does not exist.

The autograph grade is worth paying for here. On most signers we would tell you to look past it. On his it is close to a price ladder, and the gap between graded and merely authenticated is threefold.

And anything presented as signed after January 1988 needs explaining. There is no legitimate late-period Maravich. No private signings in the 1990s, no manufacturer programme, no rediscovered stock.

The thing worth sitting with

The autopsy, made public a week after he died, found that he had been born without a left coronary artery. A single enlarged right artery had wrapped the whole way around his heart doing both jobs, and it is a condition that usually kills in early childhood.

He scored 3,667 points in three college seasons on it and played a decade of professional basketball, and nobody detected it while he was alive.

So the market in his signature is the size it is because of something that was true from the day he was born and was not discovered until the day after he stopped signing.

Eighteen years of ink, and thirty-eight years of it getting rarer.

This index records documented sales of his signed material, with the autograph grade reported separately from the card grade. There are companion pieces on Joe Louis and Honus Wagner, whose supplies stayed open far longer and whose markets look nothing like his. You can read how we work the numbers out.

Sources