A’ja Wilson is the only player in WNBA history to win league MVP, Finals MVP and Defensive Player of the Year in the same season, and she might just be the most underrated athlete in the hobby.
From an accolades standpoint, Wilson’s résumé is unparalleled.
She’s the only player in WNBA history to win four league MVPs — and she did it while leading the Las Vegas Aces to championships in three out of the last four years.
Wilson’s individual stats are stunning, too. She became the first WNBA player to score 1,000 points in a single season in 2024, and she has averaged a double-double over each of the last two seasons.
Her card market hardly reflects that success, however, and collectors have largely passed on Wilson despite her being one of the most successful athletes of her generation, regardless of sport.
Market Movers has tracked fewer than 800 sales for Wilson over the last 365 days, which ranks 16th among women’s basketball players tracked by the third-party data tool.
Still considered small compared to other categories, the WNBA card market has been dominated by players from the 2024 WNBA Draft, including No. 1 overall pick Caitlin Clark. Market Movers has logged more than 205,000 sales for Clark over the last year, nearly 21,000 for Cameron Brink and more than 18,000 for Angel Reese.
The market experiences a significant drop-off beyond that trio, with Rickea Jackson’s nearly 6,000 sales the fourth-most from the WNBA over the last 365 days.
Even Nika Mühl, who missed the entire 2025 WNBA season with a torn ACL, has had more than 4,000 sales tracked by Market Movers over the last year.
A possible explanation for Wilson’s low sales volume could be a lack of total cards in the marketplace. Drafted in 2018, Wilson’s key rookies were made by Rittenhouse, which released base cards for the WNBA as part of a factory set limited to 500.
With a lower number of overall cards in the marketplace, a reasonable expectation would be that her key cards would hold significant value over higher print run examples. That holds true to some extent.
Wilson’s flagship rookie card, her 2018 Rittenhouse WNBA Base No. 48, has a PSA 10 population of just 69 and has recently sold for roughly $3,600 in gem-mint condition. A short-printed Platinum variation of that card, numbered to just 25, holds Wilson’s public record, according to Card Ladder, with a sale of $11,216 in June.
That public record is where the market between Wilson and other key WNBA players becomes even more significant. Though the comparison is far from apples-to-apples because of the cards being analyzed, it’s still surprising to see Brink’s public record of $16,287 for a 2024 Panini Prizm Black Finite 1/1 well ahead of Wilson. Reese’s public record of $32,700, which was spent on a 2024 Rookie Royalty WNBA Green Kaboom 1/1 in August, is possibly even more stunning.
Comparing Wilson’s records to Clark isn’t worth considering due to Clark’s extreme popularity in the hobby at large, not just among WNBA collectors.
The difference in cards available for Wilson and younger WNBA stars makes it difficult to create direct comparisons, but the sentiment is still clear. Wilson is simply far less popular than many of the key recent draftees in terms of volume, and her public records lag well behind, too.
A relatively-low population for her key rookies has helped prop those cards up well on the secondary market, but they still fall short of the public records for some of her younger peers.
It’s hard to argue Wilson should have matching record sales when similar cards simply don’t exist for her, but it’s still fair to wonder if the delta shouldn’t be as big as it is.
For collectors, Wilson’s success is likely the best-case scenario for what many of the WNBA’s top young prospects could eventually be. Fans of the WNBA might even be watching the sport’s GOAT during her prime, and they just don’t know it yet.
Maybe Wilson’s cards catch up as the WNBA market grows on the court and in the hobby, but for now she’s underappreciated and it’s hard to know when — or if — that ever changes.
Ben Burrows is a reporter and editor for cllct, the premier company for collectible culture. He was previously the Collectibles Editor at Sports Illustrated. You can follow him on X and Instagram @benmburrows.