Box Break: 2008-09 Panini Stickers

K–Mart 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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. ■

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 View all posts by Sal Barry