Wayback Wednesday: Basketball Trading Cards
This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at basketball trading cards.
As a young, newly-minted hardcore basketball fan in the mid 90s, I couldn’t get enough of the sport. I indulged this new love of hoops in a variety of ways. At school, I hit the blacktop with my friends as often as we could, with at least three or four of us bringing our own ball most days. I eagerly anticipated the Game of the Week and every episode of NBA Action, either staying up late or setting the VCR to record them. Obviously, I played basketball video games, especially NBA Live, NBA Jam, and World League Basketball. And yes, I collected basketball trading cards, too.
Trading cards, basketball or otherwise, are indeed still a thing. It’s actually cool to see, given that online resources and a move away from physical media in general easily could’ve rendered them an outdated concept. I haven’t actively collected cards in a long time, but in the early years of my basketball fandom, I enthusiastically bought packs whenever I could. There’s also a connection to basketball gaming here, as they were once handy sources of information when creating roster mods. They’re certainly nostalgic for many of us basketball fans, so let’s take a look back…way back…
Although my basketball fandom didn’t kick into high gear until around 1996, I did have a casual interest in the sport before that. After all, basketball was huge in the 90s, a time when popular culture was far less fractured. I was gifted my first packs in 1993, specifically the 1993-1994 Upper Deck set. I didn’t even have a proper folder and sleeves to store them in, so I kept them safe in a desk top alphabetical file! I still have those cards today, which included the Michael Jordan from the Skylights series of inserts. I didn’t fully comprehend MJ’s greatness at that point, but I knew he was an awesome and spectacular player, and so I treasured that card from the very beginning.
For Christmas 1994, I was gifted a bundle of 1994-1995 Upper Deck Collector’s Choice packs, as well as a card folder. I still wasn’t a fully-fledged hoops fan or card collector at that point, but opening up all of those packs and ending up with a decent number of regular cards along with some cool inserts taught me the names of so many stars and role players alike. In fact, when I reflect upon how often packs yielded the cards of top players when I was actively collecting, it underscores just how unfair the odds in MyTEAM are! Granted, those digital cards have a more practical use and there’s the matter of competitive balance to consider, but the odds aren’t realistic.
I still remember the afternoon that truly tipped off my interest in collecting basketball trading cards. I was now a keen fan: hooping at school, playing NBA Live 95, NBA Live 96, and NBA Jam Tournament Edition, and devouring any NBA content that I could, from games and highlights to books and magazines. One afternoon, I walked down to the local shops with a couple of friends, and we all bought 1995-96 Topps Series 2 packs. From that moment, I was hooked. Of course I wanted to get the MJ I saw on the checklist, and eagerly anticipated it in every pack I bought thereafter. On my twelfth birthday, I was gifted a bunch of those packs, and finally got His Airness.
Over the next couple of seasons, I collected a variety of basketball trading cards. Back then, there were a few companies producing cards, each with their own designs and special insert series. To that end, I sought out Upper Deck, Upper Deck Collector’s Choice, Topps, Fleer, and Hoops alike. There was a vending machine in a fish and chip shop around the corner, which my cousin and I dropped several dollars into to buy packs and even some single cards one school holidays. I even found some 1990-91 Hoops packs for sale in local store in 1998, presumably pulled out of storage and put on sale at a bargain price to get rid of them. I was only too happy to do my part!
Many of us who collected basketball trading cards in the 90s – or any trading cards for that matter – often spoke of selling them for a huge profit down the road. Sure, they were fun to collect and look at in the meantime, but there was always this notion that they were also an investment. If you want to know how successful that venture was, well, I still have my entire collection! As it turns out, if something is mass-produced and everyone holds onto it, then it doesn’t actually become a rare, valuable collectible; who’d have thought? Part of me always felt wistful about the prospect of selling them one day though, so I’m not exactly heartbroken about still having them as mementos.
Trading cards are, as the name implies, intended to be traded with other collectors in order to complete sets or otherwise acquire desirable cards. Of course, fair trades require honesty, goodwill, and knowledge of the cards and their value; something that young kids don’t always have. To that end, basketball trading cards were banned at my primary school, because too many older kids ripped off their younger peers with unfair swaps. As such, I only ever traded with friends before or after school, or with my cousin when he stayed with us during the holidays. Indeed, my cousin and I had a system and understanding which allowed us to trade cards without any arguments.
Being as close as we were, we weren’t interested in taking advantage of each other in trades. This trust allowed us to give each other “future picks”, not unlike an NBA team trading a future draft selection. Basically, we’d agree to a swap of cards that was slightly uneven, with the agreement that the person getting lower value in the trade could choose any card from a future pack the other bought. Much like a conditional pick, this excluded our favourite players, Michael Jordan and Shawn Kemp. Once again, because of our trust and familial relationship, we were able to negotiate and avoid the drama that often led to rifts between friends when swapping trading cards.
While a majority of my collection is made up of regular cards, I did end up with some cool inserts (aka chase cards) over the years, including a couple that are or were worth a bit of money. Again, only the rarest cards gained and maintained significant value, with most of the inserts that I own being worth only a few dollars at most. As I said though, I was always somewhat lukewarm to the idea of selling my cards, so I was far more interested in the thrill of collecting cool inserts and enjoying the unique designs than the prospect of one day profiting off of them. With that being said, I do have some doubles in storage, and if any of them are valuable, I’m open to making a sale!
Even though my keen interest in basketball remained beyond The Last Dance in 1998 – I still consider myself a dedicated hoop head, after all – it was definitely the peak of the sport’s popularity in Australia. It became harder to find merchandise, and by the 2000 season, the free-to-air stations had lost the rights to broadcast games. I was still playing basketball video games, competing in my local junior league, and following the NBA, but I lost interest in collecting trading cards. As such, outside of a couple of packs I’ve purchased on a lark in the years since – including the ones I bought to make a comparison video for NBA 2K17 MyTEAM – my card collection ended in 1998.
However, even though I wasn’t actively collecting basketball trading cards, I still found a use for the ones that I already had. The backs of the regular cards were an excellent resource for information about players before we had Basketball Reference just a couple of clicks away. Heights, weights, date of birth, years pro, draft info, year-by-year statistics…you could find all of that data on basketball trading cards! True, you needed to have collected them in the first place, so in that regard they weren’t as reliable as an almanac or the NBA encyclopedia. They were still handy though, both for the information on the back, and for the players’ photos on the front.
When I first started making roster updates for NBA Live 96 PC, it wasn’t always easy to find information on the new rookies, or photos of what they looked like; again, no Basketball Reference, no Google Image Search! Therefore, magazine articles, profiles on NBA Action, and trading cards were essential to modding rosters. Similarly, when I was creating my 1996 mod for NBA Live 2001, my collection was extremely useful for looking up the stats and bio data of players who weren’t in NBA Live 96 PC. I’m grateful for the resources that we now have for modding or simply looking something up out of interest, but it was fun putting basketball trading cards to use in that way.
Speaking of the connection between basketball trading cards and video games, there’s another unfortunate parallel here. Just as we’ve gone from a wide selection of NBA video games to NBA 2K basically being the only title that’s regularly on the market, since 2009, Panini has been the exclusive trading card partner of the NBA. Much as having more than one developer producing basketball video games gave us a choice and different approaches to the virtual hardwood, multiple trading card companies meant a variety of art styles and concepts for inserts. With all due respect to Visual Concepts and Panini, gaming and card collecting has thus become quite homogenised.
It’s therefore no surprise that I have similar nostalgia for basketball cards as I do for basketball video games. Flipping through my collection today takes me back much the same way that revisiting a favourite game does. I’m reminded of the excitement of opening a pack to find a card that I coveted, discussing swaps with my cousin and friends, and referring to my collection when creating roster mods. They were a fun way to indulge my burgeoning hoops fandom, and easily my favourite 90s collection fad! Basketball trading cards weren’t the lucrative investment some thought they’d be, but for me, the joy that came with collecting still makes them money well spent.
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