National Basketball Association will launch its new Ethereum (ETH) based NFT collection of 18,000 assets titled The Association. The collection will consist of 75 NFTs of each player from the 16 different NBA teams participating in the 2022 NBA playoffs. 

According to the announcement, the Association is a collection of dynamic NFTs that change in appearance over time based on team and player on-court performance. The announcement also adds that the 2022 NBA playoffs NFTs are being issued as blind-mints, which means they will not know which player they will receive prior to the reveal on April 22. In this year's playoffs, each Association NFT represents a real NBA player. Chainlink (LINK) VRF will be used through which players will be assigned randomly and transparently. This means a fair and equal chance will be given to each player for minting any player of the 16 playoff teams. 

Players' appearance can be changed automatically which is dependent on pre-set achievements that are written into Galaxis smart contract. Based on each player’s real-life performance, NFT traits will evolve over the course of the playoffs, and NFT backgrounds and “frames” will also change. On Friday NFT art will be revealed and visible on NFT marketplaces including and visible on NFT marketplaces OpenSea.

As per the website, NFTs will be free to mint although collectors who are interested have to pay for the cost of gas on Ethereum. NBA Top Shot NFT holders will be able to access some assets which were kept in reserve by the NBA, with a limit of one per wallet. 

After the NBA launched a Discord server that involved nearly 50,000 members and a fresh Twitter account dedicated to all things NBA x NFT, the news for this NFT launch came. NBA x NFT  is an NBA Discord to engage with NBA fans on everything Web3. Branding was done at the beginning of this month and also NBA had filed a trademark application for “The Association”. The Golden State Warriors (GSW), launched at 2022 playoff NFT collection with a limited collection of 2,000 NFTs on the FTX NFT marketplace. These NFTs were randomly assigned when minted on the Solana (SOL) blockchain via FTX. Each design has its own utility and benefits along with its unique level of rarity. NBA and Dapper Labs launched the NBA NFT marketplace Top Shot in 2020 which is built on the Flow (FLOW) blockchain.

Unique blockchain tokens that indicate one’s ownership over an asset, like a piece of digital art are referred to as NFTs. Gary Vaynerchuk-backed NFT basketball game Swoops last week declared about $3.5 million funding round so as to create its fantasy sports title on Polygon.