Box Break: 2008-09 Panini Stickers

boxKMart stores in Illinois are selling full boxes of older Panini Hockey Stickers at heavily discounted prices.I purchased a box of 2008-09 Panini Hockey Stickers for $21.99 plus tax at a Super K-Mart in Bradley, IL yesterday. A box contains 50 packs. Each pack has five stickers. Packs originally sold for 89 cents, so at $22 a box I basically got these at half price. Although I acquired an album a long time ago, I never did bother to build this set. I figured now was a good time to do so.

Unlike other sets, though, there are no jersey cards, autographs or other “hits” to hope for. My only hope was at building a complete set.

But that won’t happen with only one box. There are 270 stickers in the set, and a box will yield 250 stickers — meaning that with perfect collation, I would still fall 20 stickers short. But that would put me in the neighborhood, so I decided to give it a shot.

Here’s a rundown of what I was in my box:

  • 208 stickers towards a complete set (77% complete). This included 187 player stickers and 21 shiny logo stickers.

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  • 42 doubles (38 player stickers and four shiny logo stickers).

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  • The shiny logo stickers were found one in every two packs. More than half of the packs did have a logo sticker, while some had even two.
  • Each team has nine stickers in the set, I got all nine stickers for the Chicago Blackahwks, Toronto Maple Leafs and Columbus Blue Jackets.

blackhawks_pages

  • The teams that I got the least stickers were of the Vancouver Canucks, New York Islanders and Pittsburgh Penguins. I only pulled four stickers from each of those teams.

penguins_pages

  • Usually in a box of Panini Stickers, you will get zero of a particular sticker and three or four copies of another sticker in the same box. The same rang true here. My box was blessed with four stickers of Sheldon Souray.

souray souray
souray sheldon

I honestly knew that I would not get zero doubles in this box. But really, four Sheldon Souray stickers?

I still need 62 stickers to finish my set. Unfortunately for me, some are of good players like Sidney Crosby and Steven Stamkos, so I won’t be finding those guys for a quarter.

Update: I have since completed my set, and no longer need any stickers for it.

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Author: Sal Barry

Sal Barry is the editor and webmaster of Puck Junk. He is a freelance hockey writer, college professor and terrible hockey player. Follow him on Twitter @puckjunk

3 thoughts on “Box Break: 2008-09 Panini Stickers”

  1. We could get away with the terrible collation in Panini boxes because there were four kids working on the set at the same time. I will miss that product. It was one of the few that really won with kids.

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