A teen in Oregon bought a Los Angeles Lakers jacket for $3 at Goodwill, only to find out later that it could be worth $250,000.
Quinn Brown, a teenager from Portland, discovered a Wilt Chamberlain Los Angeles Lakers warm-up jacket at the Hillsboro Goodwill Outlet in January, priced at $3.07, that another shopper had tossed back into a clothing bin. So he bought it.
Brown suspected it was the real thing, but he wasn’t sure. After some online investigating, he discovered that Chamberlain’s 1972 NBA Finals jacket appeared to mirror the stitch patterns on his Goodwill find.
A few months later, experts confirmed that Wilt Chamberlain wore the Lakers warm-up jacket during the 1972-73 season and the 1972 NBA Finals.
The jacket was photomatched to three separate images: a photo taken during the 1972-73 NBA season, a photo taken in January 1973 during the 1972-73 NBA season, and a photo taken during a home game against the Knicks during Game 1 or Game 2 of the 1972 NBA Finals.
A 19-year-old Portland thrift shopper named Quinn Brown bought a yellow Lakers warm-up jacket for $3.07 at a Goodwill outlet in Oregon. The kid had a hunch that this was an authentic warm-up.
— SpursRΞPORTΞR (@SpursReporter) July 4, 2026
Next thing you know, experts at Sotheby’s authenticated it as a jacket worn by Wilt… pic.twitter.com/mWj4PuWZDq
The rare Wilt Chamberlain Lakers jacket is now up for auction
Now that experts have professionally authenticated it, Sotheby’s New York is currently auctioning it, and it currently has a high bid of $20,000. According to the auction house, bidding could reach $150,000 to $250,000 before the auction ends.
“What makes this jacket particularly significant is the combination of the photomatch and what it connects to,” Sotheby’s wrote in the description. “Being matched to multiple independent photographs across a single season already places an item in a small category. The possibility that one of those photographs was taken during the 1972 NBA Finals pushes it further still. Photomatching a piece of game-worn clothing to a specific Finals series, for a player of this era, is genuinely exceptional.
“And then there is the question of finality. Items from a player’s last active season carry a weight that nothing else can replicate. When Chamberlain retired after 1972-73, the supply of things he would ever wear on an NBA court became fixed forever. This jacket is part of that fixed, finite group.”