*This piece first appeared in the Front Office Sports Newsletter. Subscribe today and get the news before anyone else.
The NBA season hasn’t even started yet and Zion Williamson is breaking records.
According to the Fanatics, in the five days after being drafted by the Pelicans, Williamson sold more jerseys and T-shirts than all the first-round picks in the 2018 NBA Draft combined.
The dynamic Duke duo…
RJ Barrett, Williamson’s teammate at Duke, got in on the action as well. According to Fanatics, he has sold twice as much merchandise as Lonzo Ball, who had set the previous record for NBA Draft merch sales after becoming the Lakers’ No. 2 draft pick in 2017,
Together, the duo of Williamson and Barrett have combined to sell more jerseys and shirts than any other set of draftees in history.
A massive few weeks for Fanatics…
It’s good to be Michael Rubin and Fanatics. In the last few weeks alone, both of these things happened:
– The Raptors notched the second-highest-ever NBA championship sales, falling short of the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2016. Of the Raptors orders, 81% of them came through mobile, the highest the company has ever seen.
– It took only 12 hours for Blues fans celebrating the first Cup in the franchise’s 52-year history to shatter Fanatics’ previous sales record for Stanley Cup championship merchandise, set by the Washington Capitals in 2018.
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