The 2020 Basketball Hall of Fame $5 Gold Coin

On December 21, 1891, a Canadian gym teacher named James Naismith nailed a peach basket to a wall in Springfield, Massachusetts, and gave his bored students a new game to play indoors over the winter. He called it "basket ball." Congress put that exact date into the law that created this coin — a quiet nod to where the whole thing started.

The coin itself honors a younger anniversary. The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, the museum in Springfield that keeps the sport's history, was founded in 1959. In 2020 it turned 60, and Congress marked the occasion with a three-coin set: a clad half dollar, a silver dollar, and this — the gold one, a half eagle (the old name for a $5 gold coin).

The authorizing law was the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame Commemorative Coin Act. It passed both houses of Congress and was signed on December 21, 2018 — exactly 127 years to the day after Naismith hung that basket — becoming Public Law 115-343. The law did something unusual: it told the Mint to choose the main design through an open public competition, not just hand it to staff engravers. Anyone could enter.

Pick this coin up and the first thing you notice is that it isn't flat. It's curved — domed, like a tiny saucer. The obverse (the heads side) curves inward, concave; the reverse (the tails side) bulges outward, convex. Hold it the right way and the back swells like a basketball. This was only the third curved coin the U.S. Mint had ever made, after the 2014 National Baseball Hall of Fame coins and the 2019 Apollo 11 set.

The obverse design won that public contest. The artist was Justin Kunz, an illustration professor at Brigham Young University who also designs for the Mint's Artistic Infusion Program — its roster of outside artists. His image shows three players, arms stretched, all reaching for a single ball above them. The three are chosen deliberately: a Black man, a white woman, and a white man in a wheelchair — a Paralympian. The point is plain without a word of caption: this is a game anyone can play. Kunz lengthened the arms slightly to push the sense of full-body effort. A hoop and net frame the scene.

The reverse — a basketball dropping cleanly through a net — was designed by Donna Weaver, a retired Mint sculptor-engraver. The law itself had asked for a basketball on this side, so the design answers a requirement written into the statute. (Each side was then sculpted for striking by Mint engravers Michael Gaudioso and Phebe Hemphill.)

One more first: the silver dollar and half dollar in this program were the Mint's first-ever colorized coins, with a painted basketball on the reverse. The gold $5 was left in plain gold — the metal was the statement.

This is a modern commemorative, so there are no rare die varieties or century-old hoards to chase. What matters is supply and condition.

The Mint was allowed to make up to 50,000 of these gold coins, split between two finishes: a proof (the mirror-and-frost look, struck on polished blanks with specially prepared dies) and an uncirculated (a brilliant but matte business strike). Crucially, sales fell well short of that ceiling — across U.S. commemoratives of this era, real demand routinely lands far below the legal cap. That makes the actual number struck the figure that matters, and it is much smaller than 50,000. Treat any single quoted mintage with care until you confirm it against the Mint's final audited sales report; the cap is the only hard number, and the truth sits well under it.

Because so few exist, condition does the work. Slabbed coins graded at the very top — MS70 for the uncirculated, PF70 for the proof (a flawless coin under magnification) — command the strongest prices, with the gold's melt value setting a hard floor under everything. The "W" mintmark is on every example; there's no second mint to hunt. For a set collector, the prize is reuniting all three denominations, or all three with their colorized variants.