The Basketball Hall of Fame Half Dollar: a coin shaped like the backboard

Most coins are flat. This one isn't. The 2020 Basketball Hall of Fame half dollar is curved — the obverse (the heads side) is concave, scooped inward, and the reverse (the tails side) bulges out in a dome. Set it on a table and it rocks.

That shape isn't a gimmick. It echoes a basketball backboard and the ball arcing toward the net, so the coin physically mimics the sport it honors. Congress wrote the curve into the law itself: the 2018 act that authorized these coins ordered the Mint to strike them "in the shape of a basketball."

The reason for the coin at all was an anniversary. It marks the 60th anniversary of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts — the shrine to the game Dr. James Naismith invented there in 1891 with a peach basket and a soccer ball. The Mint launched sales on June 4, 2020.

Curved coins were still a young idea for the United States. The Mint had only ever made two before: the 2014 National Baseball Hall of Fame coins and the 2019 Apollo 11 50th anniversary coins. Basketball was the third — and it added a twist the first two never tried.

The obverse shows three players, arms outstretched, reaching together for a single ball — a deliberately universal scene, not portraits of named stars. It came out of an open public design competition the Mint ran in 2019; the winning artwork is by Justin Kunz of the Mint's Artistic Infusion Program, sculpted by Mint engraver Michael Gaudioso. The reverse, mandated by the legislation, shows a basketball dropping cleanly through the net — designed by Donna Weaver and sculpted by Phebe Hemphill.

Then came the part that made collectors sit up. The Mint offered a colorized version of the half dollar — the orange ball with its black ribs, a red rim, a white net, all applied in color over the struck coin. It was, alongside the colorized silver dollar in the same program, the first colorized coin in the history of the United States Mint.

For a 228-year-old institution that had always let metal speak for itself, that was a genuine departure — and the colorized half dollar outsold even the larger colorized silver dollar when it went on sale.

This is a modern commemorative, so it was sold by the Mint to collectors rather than spent — you won't find one in pocket change. That shapes how to think about it. There are no rare circulation finds here; what varies is the finish and the version.

The standard half dollar came two ways: an Uncirculated coin struck at Denver (a "D" mint mark) and a Proof — a specially polished, mirror-field strike — from San Francisco (an "S"). On top of those sat the headline pieces: the colorized Proof, capped at 75,000, and an enhanced uncirculated half dollar, finished with a laser-polishing technique and offered mainly in a "Kids Set" aimed at young collectors.

Sales came in well under the 750,000 the law allowed. Reported figures put the standard clad half dollars in the low tens of thousands, with the colorized version selling strongly out of the gate. For collectors, that modest take is the point: low mintages on a coin that was already unusual make the better-finished and colorized examples the ones to watch. Top-graded examples — a "70" from a grading service, meaning as struck and flawless under magnification — carry the premium, as they do across modern commemoratives.

The honest appeal, though, isn't scarcity. It's the object. A coin you can't stack, in the first colors the Mint ever used, for a sport invented with a peach basket. That's a story that sells itself.