Basketball Cards

For many young boys, trading basketball cards was a rite of passage. Whether it was swapping a 1992-93 Shaquille O’Neal Fleer Ultra rookie card for a Michael Jordan in the same set, or a 1972-73 Topps rookie card of Julius Erving for that year’s Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, many a kid has celebrated his trade coups, while just as many others have kicked themselves in defeat. Even though the NBA didn’t take shape until 1948, basketball cards actually date to 1910 and the Egyptiene Cigarette’s College Athletes Felts B-33 series. Basketball cards were printed for one more year after that, but basketball players would not appear on a card again until 1932, when C.A. Briggs Chocolate published a 31-card set. Each card in that set featured an illustration of a player from a popular sport, including basketball. Bowman first printed basketball cards in 1948 with players from the Basketball Association of America, while Topps didn’t dip into the market until 1957. In fact, Topps has had an on-again, off-again relationship with basketball cards, stopping and starting over the years. For example, in 1971, Topps began printed cards for players in the ABA, which had been founded a few years earlier in 1967. Unfortunately, Topps only made cards for the half dozen or so star players on each team. By the time a number of ABA teams were subsumed into the NBA in 1976, the majority of the league's players had never had a card of their own. Even worse was for Topps was the opportunity it missed in 1986, when the company did not get the chance to publish Michael Jordan's rookie card. Instead, that windfall went to Fleer, which printed the most coveted card in the hobby, the ‘86-‘87 Jordan showing the NBA’s greatest player skying over opponents en route to the hoop. More recently, since 2009, the Italian card company Panini, which until then had probably been best known for its soccer cards, has been the exclusive publisher of NBA cards. It began its relationship with a bang by signing Kobe Bryant to be its official spokesman and trading-card ambassador. In 2020, after the tragic death of Bryant and others in a helicopter crash, Panini issued so-called redemption packs to customers who were due Bryant autographed cards. Among the players whose cards were substituted fro Brant's were Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors and Luka Donkic of the Dallas Mavericks.