Special-edition OVO Air Jordan Xs won at Raptors’ Drake Night going for $100K on eBay … maybe
As you've probably heard, the Toronto Raptors held Drake Night on Saturday. The celebration of the organ-eye-zation's budding partnership with its multiplatinum-selling "global ambassador" featured, among other things, a throwback jersey in Mr. Graham's suit-jacket lining (shouts to the 2013 NBA draft), Drake introducing the Raptors' lineup, some griping at the officials and, during a halftime DJ set/public address, Drake giving out a couple of pairs of his special edition, October's Very Own-branded OVO Air Jordan X sneakers:
"These are definitely not going to fit you," Drake told the young lady selected as the winner of one pair of the OVO Jordan Xs. "But hopefully you can give them to somebody or keep them as a keepsake."
Yeah ... um, about that:
The sneakers hit eBay at 6:37 p.m. ET on Monday, about a half-hour before the Raptors tipped off their 116-94 win over the Milwaukee Bucks — with a starting price of $300.
"I received them from Drake himself at Drake night at the Raptors [game]," the seller wrote. "Drake was seen wearing the same ones at the game that night."
Within four hours, the price had exceeded $2,000.
If things had wrapped up there, this would have been quite the successful come-up for the seller. Clearing a couple grand for something you got for nothing isn't anything to sneeze at, after all, and being able to use a promotional item to make a tidy profit in the secondary marketplace — as some fans are evidently doing with the limited edition T-shirt given out on Saturday — for an item you personally don't want or need would seem to represent the continued health of the collectibles market. (Even if, as Raptorfan.ca's Burhan Ehsan told the Toronto Star, being able to so quickly re-sell these Drake-related clothing items at a markup seems less "hilarious" than "ridiculous.")
As more and more sneaker and hip-hop sites began to pick up on the scent, though, the bids continued to come in on the OVO Jordan Xs, and the price continued to increase ... to a pretty insane degree. As of 2:55 p.m. ET on Tuesday, the high bid is $100,000 U.S.. Yep.
So, how the heck did that happen?
Well, a look through the bid history shows that business picked up in earnest at 10:06 p.m. ET Monday, when one eBay user ("o***h") set a new high mark of $25,200 and promptly raised the bar to $29,600 with 23 bids in $200 installments placed in less than a minute. The action got decidedly more ridiculous when the next nine bids cranked the price up, in giant county-clearing leaps, to $80,000; from here, "o***h" resumed his/hers/its incremental increasing before standing pat with the mark set at $90,000 at 11:14 p.m. ET. In 68 minutes, the auction price of one pair of black size 11 Drake-branded sneakers had increased by $65,000.
The bidding continued in smaller bites overnight, eventually dying down just before 2:30 a.m. ET Tuesday at $99,900, and stayed there until Tuesday afternoon, when "i***p" moved it into six-figure territory. How high it will go is anybody's guess; the auction doesn't close for another four days. Whether anyone will actually pay the final price, though, remains to be seen. Given the persistent bidding of "o***h" — that one user accounts for 62 of the 154 bids on the item to date — it sure seems like this whole thing could be the result of some shenanigans on the part of someone looking to ratchet up the final asking price of these Jordan Xs rather than the natural outgrowth of rabid demand for a very limited-edition item.
It's difficult to envision a pair of Drake-branded sample Jordans going for as much as, or maybe even more than, the actual sneakers that Michael Jordan wore during the Flu Game, but the Internet seems to come up with new shocking and completely insane revelations on a daily basis; perhaps this is merely another example of the utterly ridiculous becoming just another routine part of everyday life. We should know in four days. In the meantime, if you've got hundreds of thousands of dollars of disposable income and want some Drake sneakers, now you know where you can get involved. You're welcome.
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is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!
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