Brands
Browse NBA Trading Cards by Brand
Panini
帕尼尼
Held the NBA licence for over fifteen years — Prizm, Select, Mosaic; licence transferred October 2025
Upper Deck
上甲板
Classic trading card brand, SP Authentic, Exquisite Collection
Topps
托普斯
Historic trading card brand, Chrome series
Skybox
天盒
Classic 90s brand, high vintage collector value
Fleer
弗利尔
Classic vintage brand, Jordan rookie card
Hoops
篮圈
Entry-level series, a Panini brand
Why these brands are not interchangeable
The brand on a card is not a style choice by the manufacturer. At any given time only one company holds the NBA trading card licence, and that licence decides who may print cards carrying team logos and uniforms at all. Which brand a card comes from therefore tells you roughly when it was made.
That licence changed hands recently. Panini held the NBA exclusive for more than fifteen years; on 1 October 2025 it passed to Fanatics Collectibles, which owns Topps. Panini-branded NBA cards are therefore a closed set — no new ones are being licensed — while Topps returns to a league it had been absent from for years.
For collectors buying from China this transition matters more than it might elsewhere: Fanatics has said its NBA card rollout starts with an emphasis on China. However that develops, the practical point today is that Panini stock is finite while Topps NBA product is new — two very different things to be holding.
Upper Deck, Fleer, SkyBox and Hoops belong to earlier eras of the licence. Cards under those names circulate on the secondary market only, which is why condition and authentication carry more weight there than with current production — there is no manufacturer left to replace a damaged copy.