August second ushered in the start of NBA free agency this year, just days after the NBA draft, which was pushed back for the second consecutive year due to the ripple effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. It also brought a chance for me to get caught up on some recent mail, including an envelope holding my first actual NBA basketball card of the recently concluded 2020-21 season. Never in my collecting life have I completely lost a basketball card season, though it nearly happened.
And what a card – its shiny, (what more can you ask for) and features the first truly great Portland Trail Blazer, not to mention the team’s fantastic first generation road jersey. It also represents my first Geoff Petrie autograph on cardboard. I do have a warmup signed by him, (as well as Jim Paxson and Jerome Kersey), but this is the first card.
One of the happy accidents of the current over-priced and under-available basketball card market is the fact that most people don’t buy this stuff for sticker graphs of players who last laced them up 40+ years ago. Consequently, people like me can pick up fantastic additions to their collections for just a few bucks a pop. This is where I will gladly display my soon-to-be old guy bonafides by saying something like “let the sneaker heads chase the three or four rookies in this class who will share a total of five all star appearances – I want the Ivy Leaguer who was forced out of the game due to injury four years before I was born, only to eventually build the under-appreciated Sacramento Kings teams that went on to be robbed of a championship by David Stern’s officials in the early 2000s…”
The fact that I couldn’t find any NBA cards on retail shelves meant the only basketball cards I bought this year were a few lowly Contenders blasters, which featured that mediocre (at press time anyway) draft class in its college glory. I’ll probably just focus on Blazers for any future 2020-21 purchases – I don’t think I missed much this year, and anyway, I’ve focused squarely on baseball for the better part of the last decade, with the exception of a few very lucky pre-pandemic grocery trips that yielded Prizm basketball (and Zion rookies) last year. The utter evaporation of basketball retail has helped me re-focus my collection, and I’ll happily sit back and look for the Rod Strickland, Andre Miller, and other underrated former Blazers who served as hits for disappointed break purchasers and flippers over the past couple of years.