2020 Basketball Hall of Fame Silver Dollar

Pick almost any coin out of your pocket and it lies flat on a table. This one rocks.

The 2020 Basketball Hall of Fame silver dollar is curved — pressed into a shallow bowl. The front (the obverse — the "heads" side) caves inward, concave like a satellite dish. The back (the reverse) pushes outward into a dome. The Mint did this so the coin would echo the game it celebrates: the curve of a backboard, the arc of a ball in flight, the round mouth of a net seen from below.

It honored a milestone. The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts — the city where James Naismith nailed up a peach basket and invented the game in 1891 — turned 60 in 2020. Congress marked the anniversary with a three-coin set: a small clad half dollar, this silver dollar, and a $5 gold piece. All three share the same dished shape.

The law behind it, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame Commemorative Coin Act, was signed on December 21, 2018 (Public Law 115-343). And as a U.S. commemorative, the coin pays its own way forward: a fixed surcharge — $10 on every silver dollar sold — goes straight to the Hall of Fame to fund its endowment and education programs. Buyers don't just collect a coin; they bankroll the museum.

The concave front is a scramble for the ball. Three players — chosen to span age, gender, and ability — leap and reach for a rebound, arms stretched slightly longer than life to sell the strain of the jump. It came from a public design contest: the Mint took 23 entries from outside artists and picked the one by Justin Kunz, who works in its Artistic Infusion Program. Sculptor-engraver Michael Gaudioso translated the drawing into metal.

The domed back is almost stark by comparison: a single basketball dropping cleanly through the net, the swish frozen mid-fall. The reverse was designed by Donna Weaver, a retired Mint sculptor-engraver, and sculpted by Phebe Hemphill. The image wasn't a free choice — the authorizing law required the reverse to show a ball going into a hoop.

Bending a coin is hard. A flat die — the hardened steel stamp that presses the design into the blank — can't make a curve in one blow. The Mint had learned the trick only in 2014, on the first U.S. curved coin, the National Baseball Hall of Fame dollar (a glove on one side, a baseball on the other). The 2019 Apollo 11 50th-anniversary dollar came next. The 2020 Basketball coins were the third curved program — and they went one step further: the silver dollar and the clad half were the first U.S. coins ever colorized by the Mint, sold in a painted version alongside the plain silver one.

This is a modern commemorative — struck for collectors, never meant for cash registers — so condition and version do the work that scarce dates do on older coins.

Four flavors of the silver dollar left the Mint: a regular proof (a mirror-finish coin struck on polished blanks with extra care), a matte-textured uncirculated strike, and colorized versions of each, with the design hand-tinted on the painted area. The colorized coins were capped far lower than the plain ones, which makes them the scarcer pull. Across all versions the Mint set a single ceiling of 400,000 silver dollars; actual sales came in under that cap, as they almost always do for commemoratives.

Because these were modern coins handled with gloves from the start, top grades are common — a coin graded MS70 or PF70 (a flawless 70 on the 70-point scale) is far easier to find here than on a century-old issue. So collectors chase the labels and the edges: early-release designations, the colorized variant, and the full original packaging with its certificate. The curved shape also makes the coin notoriously hard to photograph and easy to ding on the high points of the dome — which is part of why a clean, well-struck example still rewards a careful eye.