In the five months since Steph Curry ended his 12-year partnership with Under Armour, he’s worn sneakers from a variety of brands on the court. From April 13 to 28, 75 pairs of these sneakers will be up for auction at Sotheby’s.
Among the sneakers being auctioned include a signed Nike Hyperdunk PE that Curry wore on Christmas Day in 2010 and again in 2025, which is going for an auction-high $55,000 as of Monday afternoon. Others include sneakers paying homage to players like Kobe Bryant, Anthony Edwards, and Sabrina Ionescu, pairs from Chinese brands like Anta and Li-Ning, and the On Roger Federer tennis shoes that he wore during warm up.
These were the highest-bid shoes as of Tuesday morning:
- Nike Hyperdunk 2010 PE, signed and game-worn: $55,000 (14 bids)
- Nike Kobe 4 Protro CHBL, signed and game-worn: $30,000 (13 bids)
- Nike Kobe 6 Protro Mambacita, signed and warm up-worn: $28,000 (21 bids)
- Nike Kobe 6 Protro Team USA PE, signed and game-worn: $19,000 (17 bids)
- Nike Sabrina 3 By Stephen Curry, signed and game-worn: $18,000 (12 bids)
With Curry arguably the highest-profile basketball player to hit sneaker free agency since Bryant in 2002, the auction was “wildly unprecedented,” Sotheby’s head of streetwear Eric LiBassi tells Front Office Sports.
Sneaker industry insiders agree. “This gives that Curry fan a bit more access to a product that is directly connected to him, that we haven’t seen done in exactly this way or exactly at this volume,” Mike Sykes, author of the sneaker blog The Kicks You Wear, told FOS. “I’m not sure that we’ll see anything quite like it for a while, because athletes who have the profile of a Stephen Curry, they just don’t hit the market like that, right?” It’s not like Nike is going to let LeBron James go, Sykes says.
LiBassi declined to share details of how Curry and Sotheby’s got connected, but he noted the auction house’s previous collaborations with brands like Nike and Air Jordan as relationships that led them to that point.
Proceeds from the auction will go to Eat. Learn. Play., the foundation created by Curry and his wife, Ayesha, to fight childhood hunger. But the value of Curry’s auctioned shoes may have further implications on his free agency, as he continues to play without a brand deal.
“If one shoe sells for extraordinarily more than others, it may indicate that the association and that brand has high value, and therefore that brand might be more interested in signing him as an endorser,” Matt Powell, a sports retail industry advisor for Spurwink River, told FOS.
Powell notes that with Curry, 38, nearing the end of his career after 16 seasons in the NBA, not every brand may want to sign him to a long-term deal, so the value brought from his auction could be a way for him to “test the market” and gain leverage.
On the contrary, Sykes believes that high-bidding shoes from large brands like Nike and Adidas might not mean much for Curry’s free agency, but a shoe from a smaller brand sparking strong interest could be an opportunity for that brand to push further into the U.S. market and perhaps even court the Warriors star. The current highest-bidding non-Nike sneaker in the auction is a signed, game-worn pair of Li-Ning Jimmy Butler 3 Samba Dancer’ shoes, going for $13,000.
LiBassi says he “can’t speak to [Curry’s] intentions in terms of where he signs,” adding that the Warriors guard was focused on showcasing brands and players he admires. LiBassi also expects bidding prices to be largely determined by whether Curry wore his auctioned sneakers in a game or not.
While it’s unclear how much Curry’s auction will ultimately move the needle long term, it’s another step in his high-profile sneaker free agency, where the shoes he wears on the court are as much a subject of conversation as his play is.
“What’s really important about this is that it’s a very small, segmented moment of time,” LiBassi said of Curry’s auction. “It’s an awesome way to give back to the collectibles community. Clearly Steph was very informed in making all of these decisions, whether it be from a sneaker standpoint or from a game-worm collectibility standpoint.”
