Quinn Brown was digging through a bin of clothes at a Goodwill outside Portland last January when somebody else in the pile tossed a yellow Lakers jacket with Wilt Chamberlain’s name on it. Brown, 19, who resells thrifted clothing online, grabbed it. He paid $3.07.
On Monday, that same jacket — a short-sleeved warmup worn by Chamberlain during the 1972 NBA Finals — sold for $89,600 at Sotheby’s after 48 bids. Not a bad return for a kid whose previous top sale was a Sub Pop Records T-shirt that went for $250.
“I didn’t even think that finding something like this was possible,” Brown told the Associated Press. “I got very, very lucky.”
Sotheby’s had estimated the jacket between $150,000 and $250,000, so the final hammer price landed well below expectations. But for a three-dollar thrift pickup, nobody’s filing a complaint. The auction house described it on its website as “an extraordinary piece of memorabilia,” noting that photomatching game-worn clothing to a specific Finals series for a player of Chamberlain’s era is “genuinely exceptional.”
Brown did his homework before anyone in a suit got involved. After buying the jacket, he searched online and found a photograph of Chamberlain wearing it. He compared the Lakers patch on the front, noticed stitching details that matched, and looked up measurements from a different Chamberlain jersey. The numbers nearly aligned — which makes sense, given that Chamberlain stood 7-foot-1 and wasn’t exactly shopping the regular rack.
“I really just wanted to make sure, because it was so hard to believe at the time,” Brown said. He had only ever read about finds like this.
Once Brown posted a photo of the jacket on social media, Sotheby’s reached out about consignment. He agreed. An armored van arrived to collect it. The auction house then conducted its own photo verification and confirmed the jacket was worn by Chamberlain during the 1972 Finals — the series in which the Los Angeles Lakers beat the New York Knicks and Chamberlain was named Finals MVP.
Chamberlain played in the NBA from 1959 to 1973, won two championship rings — one with the Philadelphia 76ers in 1967, one with the Lakers in 1972 — and holds the record for most points in a single game, 100, scored in 1962. The man was a walking statistical anomaly, and his memorabilia commands prices to match. A game-worn jersey from that same 1972 Finals series sold for $4.9 million at Sotheby’s in 2023, the fourth most expensive NBA jersey the auction house has ever sold.
So a warmup jacket — not a game jersey, a warmup jacket — pulling nearly $90,000 tells you what the ceiling looks like for authenticated Chamberlain items. The jacket fell short of its estimate, but 48 bidders still fought over it. That’s a market that knows what it wants.
“That was as good as it gets,” Brown said of the find.
For a kid who’s been reselling thrift store clothes for three years, yeah. That’s about as good as it gets.