Ripped: 2025-26 Topps Hoops Basketball

Fresh wax, honest takes, and zero product copy.

May 15, 2026

Welcome to Ripped — where we tear into the hobby’s biggest new releases and show you what’s actually inside.

We bought a hobby box on preorder. Then our own Wax Watch told us to stay away.

This release is largely flying under the radar, a casualty of Fanatics/Topps dropping it the same week as Bowman Baseball, one of their most hyped releases of the year.

The biggest question we kept coming back to: what exactly is 2025-26 Topps Hoops trying to be?

When Panini held the NBA license, Hoops was their first launch of the season and one of the most affordable entry points in the hobby. With Topps, we paid $260 for a standard hobby box. That’s closer to Chrome pricing than anything we’re used to carrying the Hoops name.

Did Topps stick the landing on this one, or are we staring down serious buyer’s remorse?

Let’s rip in.

Base

The base cards are rainbow foils?!

We were genuinely confused when we opened the first pack. There’s a rainbow parallel in the checklist (more on that later), so the first thought was: did we hit a hot box? Not quite.

This is Topps’s attempt to make Hoops feel premium. Every base card, every single one, is printed on thicker stock with a rainbow foil finish. It gets distracting fast, and as you can see from the photos, it doesn’t shoot well.

We actually like the underlying design. It has that classic Hoops feel, paired with some genuinely great photography. That Shai Gilgeous-Alexander Highlights card might be one of the coolest base cards we’ve seen in a while. In another product, it could have easily been a super short print.

The cards look a lot better in hand. But there’s a real problem.

That thick stock plus the foil finish is a quality control disaster. Crimped edges. Dinged corners. Straight out of the pack. That’s forgivable in an over-printed flagship release. Not at these prices, though.

Dinged corner of a Jalen Green base card pulled fresh out of the pack

From our one-box sample, we’d be looking at a lot of 7s and 8s on graded submissions, and that’s being generous. It’s going to be hard to find a base card worth the grading fee.

The reality is blunt: these feel and look like counterfeit Chrome.

Verdict: F — Topps made a bold move here. It doesn't pay off.

Inserts

From the promo materials, we were skeptical. After ripping in person, one thing is clear: if you’re buying this product, you’re buying it for the inserts.

This is where Topps comes closest to capturing the playfulness that made old Hoops products worth collecting. The foilboard still makes these tough to photograph, but pulling one out of a pack and watching that design peek through was genuinely exciting. Quality control here was noticeably better than the base, too.

The problem? The designs are hit and miss.

When they work, they really work. Bounce House is a standout, one we’d seriously consider set collecting. Honestly, it’s more exciting than most of the designated case hits. We’d take Bounce House over Oasis or Boom Shaka Laka any day of the week.

Speaking of case hits: we didn’t pull one. And based on what we’ve seen, a lot of those designs feel random and unoriginal. The singles market will sort out which inserts actually hold value, but right now it’s hard to see most of these standing out in a crowded hobby.

Verdict: B — When they work, they really work. But the long-term value is still an open question.

Parallels

Since the Fanatics acquisition, Topps has done solid work standardizing their parallel structure across releases. Pull a colored parallel in any of their products, and you know immediately what it’s called and what it’s numbered to. That consistency has been a genuine improvement for the hobby.

Hoops throws all of it out the window, and it makes for one very confusing collecting experience.

Start with the base cards. In any other Topps product, rainbow foil stock would be a parallel, sometimes called Foilboard. Here, Topps made it the baseline for every card and every insert to justify the premium price. Fine. But then they went ahead and named the most common pull a Rainbow parallel anyway. The only difference between the base card and the rainbow parallel is a slightly streakier finish. Collectors are already guessing on eBay.

Then there’s the ~~sand glitter~~, we mean Pixel Burst. We’ve seen it before, mostly as Jumbo Hobby exclusives in flagship products. It’s fine, but these don’t usually hold much long-term value. We haven’t ripped any retail yet, but we’ve had a feeling deep down that the exclusive “Light Burst” parallels might have better eye appeal.

We were wrong. Light Bursts look more like pixels than Pixel Bursts do.

Search Topps Hoops singles on eBay right now and it’s the wild west. Nobody knows what any of these parallels are. Listings are best guesses.

That’s a huge step backwards from everything Topps has been building toward. And it’s not even the worst thing about this product.

QC is the same story as the base: with centering issues, right out of the pack.

Off-Center Gary Payton II Rainbow Parallel

Verdict: F — Topps opened up a sea of confusion, and the execution doesn't bail them out.

Hit Consistency

We could only afford one hobby box of 2025-26 Topps Hoops, so we can’t speak confidently to collation patterns.

One thing worth flagging: there wasn’t a hit in every pack. If you’re buying loose packs at your LCS or online, you might come home empty-handed.

Final Thoughts

You probably know where this is heading.

The hobby was right to look past this release and move on to the next. Topps set out to make Hoops a premium product and fell well short. There are inserts worth chasing, but that’s what the singles market is for.

Above the QC issues and the parallel confusion, it’s the price that makes this the most disappointing release of 2026 so far. A lot of these mistakes would be forgivable at $80 a box. At Chrome prices, you expect a Chrome-level product.

This isn’t that.

Final Verdict: Skip it
🏆 Most Valuable Format: No, seriously. Skip it.