Introduction

NBA 2022 season recently ended with championship of Golden State Warriors. GSW beat Dallas Mavericks in western conference finals and Boston Celtics in finals. Celtics also beat the heat at eastern conference finals.

In this analysis we want to see how NBATopShot NFTs performed during this hot days of conference finals and if there is any sign of our finalists in best performing moments.

What is NBATopShots?

It is a NFT collection on Flow blockchain, product of a collaboration between NBA and non-fungible powerhouse Dapper Labs. Top shots are unique moments of NBA games captured as short highlights and recorded on chain to be unique and ownable. It’s just as the trading card that we used to play with in our childhood and still are around with different themes; the difference is that NBATopShot assets are digital media still collectable as any physical commodity. They come in packs and sets and different rarities and can be bought and traded at NBATopShot.

Methodology

One important thing is that NBATopShot collection is being traded at different marketplaces with various currencies. But as table suggests they are neglectable comparing to volume trading on its official market so I didn’t distinct them.
Conference finals were held from May 17th to May 29th so our time period is analytically limited to that.
Data is extracted from FlipsideCrypto database.

#Data & Analysis

Nothing better than the sale volume of Collection to start with, right?

To be more distinctive, I demonstrated a much broader period to see whether the impact is noticeable or not.
Not event our chosen period has the highest spike but, more importantly, has the most consistent high volume of sales with around 400k on average.
There is a constant decrease after conference finals end.

Another way to evaluate this impact is to see whether our four finalists were among the top-selling teams or not.

The result is evident as all four teams occupied the top 4 seats of the most telling teams.
I think two factors that are determinants in the exact spot that a team occupies are their enthusiastic fanbase and also their potential to produce more memorable moments; Having Luka Duncic and Steph Curry can make a difference.
Los Angeles Sparks is the only WNBA team in the top-selling teams.

Next step, we can see how these four teams performed against each other (Not in the court, but the marketplace).

GSW had the most days in the number 1 seat, while Celtics and heat only managed once to claim this spot.
This does make sense considering the dominance of GSW over Dallas Mavericks and the close rivalry between Celtics and Heat.

But what about players? There is always a superstar involved in moments, and if top-selling players are from the finalists of each conference, it further proves that the impact is significant.

9 of the top 10 trading players are from the teams that were present at the conference finals!
Jason Tatum closely won the number 1 seat from Steph Curry and the number 3 seat belongs to a player not in the conference finals.

#Conclusion

There is no doubt that there are more trades as competition gets hotter. Still, it is not a direct impact since it seems that new sets containing moments don’t come to market instantly. If you check the top trading moment of each team, you can see that they all belong to the previous series, not the conference finals itself. For me it is the impact of getting more engaged in the games as season is coming to end.