EL SEGUNDO, Calif. — Jake LaRavia, the first free agent the Los Angeles Lakers contacted this summer, couldn’t believe he was there, face-to-face with someone he’d wanted to meet ever since he fully invested in this part of his life.
Being in the NBA had granted him this kind of opportunity, to approach the people he’d watched closely on Instagram and YouTube and he couldn’t pass up the chance to introduce himself at a party in 2024.
But the man LaRavia simply had to meet wasn’t LeBron James or Luka Dončić or Jayson Tatum. It was a former high school teacher and YMCA camp director who had become niche-famous for opening packs of sports trading cards on the internet.
And before the card shop owner from Lexington, Kentucky, could introduce himself to the NBA player, the 6-foot-7 LaRavia hustled over and beat him to it.
“Jake,” Jimmy Mahan remembered thinking, “this isn’t normally how this goes.”
Really, there’s nothing normal about the collision of LaRavia’s day job and his passion. He’s one of a small handful of NBA players who both appear on NBA cards and scour for them, ripping packs, searching internet videos and auction sites for the missing pieces in their collections.
“I’m a regular person,” he said. “I am a card collector. I play video games. I just … I’m regular.”
But regular people aren’t expected to help space the floor for Dončić and cut to the rim at the perfect moment when the defense focuses too much of its attention on James. That’s as irregular as it gets. And that’s why people in and around trading cards have embraced LaRavia.
“I couldn’t be more excited he’s one of us,” Mahan said. “He gets it.”
Earlier this summer, LaRavia sat less than two miles away from the Lakers’ practice facility in El Segundo at Bullpen Sports HQ, a converted warehouse full of memorabilia and trading cards, and opened $200 worth of products in a hunt for one of his own rookie cards.
He struck out.
But as he tore through the tinfoil and shuffled the cardboard in his hands, he pushed some of the NBA’s best names to the side.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the reigning MVP. Nikola Jokić, widely considered the best player in the world, didn’t earn a second glance. Dončić and James, his new all-world teammates, weren’t good enough.
Up the road inside the Lakers’ film room, that’d be unthinkable. But here in a place with a “Blue Chips” movie poster on the wall and products worth more than $20,000 under the glass cases, the logic is sound.
“When I’m opening cards, it’s only the hobbyist,” he said. “Yeah. I’m not an NBA player.”
See, the cards of the game’s biggest stars LaRavia pulled on that Friday were largely “base cards,” meaning they didn’t have signatures, memorabilia, special coloring or numbers indicating a limited run — the means of creating real value in the hobby.
Jake LaRavia and Dan Woike pull cards at Bullpen Sports HQ. (Photo: Garrett Richardson)
That’s why standard cards featuring James and Dončić went into the junk pile and an autographed card of little-known Milwaukee Bucks backup guard Ryan Rollins, numbered to 15 — suggesting rarity — went in a plastic sleeve before finding a home in a firmer case called a “top loader.” The base cards are usually left at the store so they can be given out to kids.
This day, the “hits” weren’t exactly 1952 Topps Mickey Mantles. LaRavia pulled a Grant Hill on-card autograph numbered 31 out of 49 printed. He pulled the Rollins and RJ Hampton autographs, the Rollins being eight of 18. And he nabbed a specially colored Al Horford numbered three out of 49 — along with like 12 more packs’ worth of junk.
“These,” he paused as he glanced at the gloss-coated stack, “are some pretty sh—y cards.”
As he carefully ripped through the pile of foil packs from the 2022-23 season, his rookie year, he was totally divorced from the way he views these players on the court.
It was his mindset when he took a box cutter to the plastic wrapping on a box or when he saved the specially-colored cards for the end — his rituals when he’s chasing the best rookie cards or inserts.
Like so many of his card-chasing peers, he got into it around 2013 when he was still in junior high by watching people like Mahan open packs on the internet. After LaRavia got interested in the hobby, he went to garage sales with his friends hunting for deals. Trips to Target and Walmart meant a stop in the one aisle near the register where he tried to talk his way into a $20 box.
The passion faded as he worked himself into a college star at Indiana State and Wake Forest, but after the Grizzlies took him 19th overall in the 2022 NBA Draft, he got back into it.
Soon, he became the world’s biggest collector of Jake LaRavia cards — he’s estimated to have 1,000, with some of the rarest versions kept secure in briefcases. He even inscribed one of the first ones he ever signed, “DM me,” so he could eventually add it to his collection.
His enthusiasm for collecting has endeared him to other people in the community, from customizing signatures to posting about the hobby, jumping on streams to rip packs and even walking the floor at some of the biggest card shows like any other average collector.
“I know people who collect Jake because he collects,” Mahan said. “It’s not even about the basketball.”
Last year, in his third NBA season, LaRavia played well enough that Memphis general manager Zach Kleiman admitted the team’s decision to decline his fourth-year player option the previous summer was a mistake. Memphis traded LaRavia to Sacramento, where he wrapped a year averaging nearly 7.0 points a game while hitting 42.3 percent from 3. He’s shown enough that the Lakers are betting that, at just 23, LaRavia can become a key role player around their stars. The two sides reached an agreement hours into free agency on June 30 on a two-year, $12 million deal.
“I just think what they’re building obviously with making the trade for Luka (Dončić) last year, played against Luka a good amount and now being able to play alongside him is a blessing. But just like high-IQ team,” he said of the Lakers’ on-court selling points. “I think I can fit in really well as being like a spacer, cutter, like even a little bit of play-making depending on who’s on the court, helping out with the rebounding and then obviously the defending, which is one of the bigger parts.
“Just being able to take on certain matchups so that the other guys that are primarily focused on offense can focus on offense and don’t have to worry about also guarding one of the opposing team’s better, better wings.”
For LaRavia, who was born in Pasadena before his family relocated to Indiana when he was young, it’s a chance to take some of the winning traits he possesses and try them out on an experienced team serious about winning, with both a clear role and a clear opportunity for maybe the first time in his pro career. And while, admittedly, a lot of the Jake LaRavia cards in circulation aren’t that valuable (you can find one on eBay for 99 cents), what he does on the court certainly can be.
“I play hard, I give my all every night,” he told reporters when he was introduced as a Laker on July 8. “Whether I’m making shots, missing shots, the one thing I can control every game is bringing that energy off the bench or whatever it is. I’ve always been that type of player that doesn’t give up on plays. I just love basketball. I bring a different type of energy to the game. Diving on loose balls, making that extra play, making those little plays. And that’s something I bring every night.”
On this day, inside the card shop, the disappointing packs didn’t send him home.
After the garbage was picked up and the lousy cards were stacked in a pile to the side, he wandered back to the cases and looked at the graded single cards and the vintage boxes that might have a LeBron James or a Luka Dončić or even a Kobe Bryant rookie hiding inside. He struck up conversations with the store’s owners and employees.
One could tell he wanted to reach inside his pocket and take a gamble. But because he just got engaged and just bought a house in the South Bay, he decided to look. It was real restraint.
This is how LaRavia is whenever cards are around, an itch he badly wants to scratch.
It’s the chase, the possibilities hidden in each pack, that is the dopamine hit for LaRavia. He doesn’t pester teammates for signatures or swipe his best cards from the printers. There’s too much respect for the craft.
He loves sending cards to be graded to authenticating services — a system where they’re judged for their corners, surface, edges and centering. He even has a good eye himself, looking at the Rollins autograph card and docking it because it wasn’t perfectly centered.
Sure, the day ended with $200 going up in flames, the hunt again a failure. The people who buy the cards have felt it — and they love that someone who appears on the cards knows it too.
“You have one box every so often that’s gonna have a good card in it,” LaRavia said, “but for the most part, yeah, it’s gonna be … a good amount of disappointment.”
But the next pack always offers possibilities — the Lakers and LaRavia both believing that something special is just a moment or two away.
(Photo: Lachlan Cunningham / Getty Images)