Story of a Card: 2020 Prizm #1 LeBron James
A simple & affordable card, with an iconic photo and a great story.
I recently sold a PSA 10 2020 Prizm #1 LeBron James card. As much as I love this card (I’m already working on grading a few more copies), I couldn’t be happier to be sending it to a good home. I’m one of those collectors that believes some cards just deserve to be slabbed, and this is one of them.
I’m actually not a huge Prizm fan. At least not the base. I like some of the parallels, but I find Prizm’s chrome borders a bit underwhelming. I prefer the look of the Optic base, or some of the more off the beaten path sets.
But I’m a sucker for iconic photographs in card format, and this one fits the bill. It’s such a great shot of one of the greatest to ever play the game, and it’s got a good story behind it too.
If you run into this card for sale, you’ll often see it mentioned as a “Kobe tribute” and it is, kind of, though it wasn’t intentional.
When Kobe and his daughter were among the 9 passengers who passed away in a tragic helicopter crash on January 26, 2020, the news shook the world. Kobe wasn’t merely one of the best to play the game—he was one of the very few whose popularity lead him to transcend the sport.
Twelve days later, the Lakers were playing the Rockets in Los Angeles. In the third quarter, LeBron got free for a breakaway dunk.
Photograph Andrew Bernstein was ready, with five different remote cameras setup at different locations. As LeBron leaped into the air, Bernstein used a button to remotely trigger the photo, trying his best to time it as well as he could. While Bernstein himself noted that it’s hard to get the timing right and often the photos are just a hair earlier or later than the ideal moment, he nailed this one.
The result was, in my opinion, one of the greatest basketball photos ever taken.
It actually wasn’t LeBron’s intent to mimic Kobe. In fact, most folks didn’t even recognize the unintentional tribute until later that evening. Someone on Reddit commented that they thought Kobe had done that same dunk many times, and then combed through the footage to prove it. You can see side-by-side’s of his dunk all over YouTube now.
The resemblance is uncanny. Even LeBron was a bit blown away by it.
“I just jumped and kinda figured it out. It’s crazy how it’s the same exact dunk on the same exact hoop that Kobe did they say, what, 19 years ago or something like that. That was nuts.
….
For that to now be a part of my history, that correlation between me and Kobe and that play, I think it’s pretty awesome, and I’m glad I did it in a Laker uniform on that side of the floor.”
The comparisons went viral online in the days following the game, and what was already an amazing photograph became iconic.
Panini chose to not just use the photo on its Prizm card, but to feature it in a glorious horizontal layout on the first card in their 2020 set.
While I prefer some of the variations (the Silver and Gold Wave’s are both nice, and the Gold Prizm is stunning…if expensive), the result is a gorgeous card that, in its base form at least, won’t break the bank.