2023 NBA Draft prospect Victor Wembanyama lost a game last night, but he is winning the buzz wars. The spindly 7-foot-2 (or 3?) … center? point-pivot? wing-warrior? … led all scorers in a nationally televised exhibition between Wemby’s French squad and the G-League Ignite stars (led by another top draft prospect) and set Twitter aflame… Read More The All-Lank All-Stars: The NBA’s spindliest supermen
When I restarted my sports card collecting habit two autumns ago, global demand for cards was sky-high and global supply was super low. A would-be collector walking into a big box retailer anywhere in the country with a wallet full of cash in those days (at least a year starting in summer 2020) would almost… Read More Wow, there’s cards on shelves: Finding and breaking a booster of 2020-21 NBA Chronicles
The thing about being a casual sports card collector in the year of our lord two-thousand-twenty-one is that I’m not really “in the running” for a lot of the more premium cards on the market. I don’t have the bankroll for the /5 autographed Luka Doncic jersey card pushing five figures on eBay with a… Read More The Singles Mixer: A few of my personal basketball faves
When I first started collecting sports cards in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I remember when Skybox hit the scene. It was 1990, and Skybox’s parent company, which I now know was a spin-off of a tobacco company’s memorabilia business (strange and yet somehow such a 1980s American story), packaged futuristic looking basketball cards… Read More Blast From the Packs: An up-and-down box of 1990-91 Skybox basketball
I won’t pretend to be an expert on using eBay, but I’ve been successful in the last month or so tracking down affordable boxes of old sports cards; grab bags of random packs of sports cards; and single cards of favorite players, including rookie cards (actually, they’ve mostly been rookie cards). I’ve learned a few… Read More Blast From the Packs: How I use eBay to buy sports cards
When I look at the portion of my sports card collection I kept from when I was a kid, I see some patterns that reveal my tastes at the time. In football, I loved athletic, scrambling QBs who could wind their way out of the pocket for a first-down themselves or uncork an absolute bomb… Read More Blast From the Packs: 1992 Upper Deck Baseball, a photography master class
If you’ve been reading my posts about sports cards lately, you’ll know that I keep harping on photography as the thing that draws me to certain cards. A great photo, even if it’s of a player I’m not crazy about, will make a card much more desirable in my eyes. So when a set gives… Read More Blast From the Packs: An ode to Fleer Flair
When I bought the box of 1992 Leaf baseball, it was kind of an impulse purchase. Like when you have a little too much wine and make a late-night Amazon order: It’s fine, it’s good, but did you really need that hard-boiled egg maker? I didn’t really collect that particular season of Leaf when I… Read More Blast From the Packs: 1991-92, the first year of Upper Deck NBA
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