Hockey cards, collectibles and culture
This Carolina Hurricanes team set was issued during the 2003-04 season. The cards are quite large, measuring 4.25″ wide by 5.5″ tall and have an unusual matte finish on the front. The 23 cards in the set give us a good look at many of the players who would win the Stanley Cup two seasons later.
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Sal & Tim (@theRealDFG) are back for a long-overdue, but always fun, edition of the Puck Junk Podcast. Topics in this podcast include: 2016-17 O-Pee-Chee Platinum Hockey, coaching change chaos (!!!), the upcoming expansion draft and Zach Werenski, the most badass rookie in the NHL this season.
Total time is 47 minutes, so get comfy and hit play! ■
While sorting through a box of old hockey memorabilia, I came across this “custom card” that I made many years ago of Irwin the Penguin.
Of course, you have no idea who Irwin the Penguin is, so allow me to explain. Back when we were kids, Irwin was my sister’s favorite stuffed animal. One day during the summer of 1989, I decided to make a drawing of her toy penguin as a member of the Pittsburgh Penguins, since that seemed like an obvious team to put him on.
But it wasn’t *just* a drawing — it was a hockey card, complete with statistics on the back. Continue reading “Custom Hockey Card: Irwin the Penguin”
Upper Deck has released a new hockey collectible that will cost some serious…coin. On Monday evening at the Hockey Hall of Fame, the trading card company announced the launch of the Grandeur Hockey Coin Collection, a series of limited-edition coins minted in silver and gold. The coins are available for purchase starting on April 5 and sell for $100 to $500.
“I look at this as a game-changing product line, similar to what we did in 1989 with trading cards,” said Jason Masherah, president of Upper Deck, in an interview with Puck Junk. “Nobody has ever blind-packed precious metal coins before.”
Have you ever wanted to create your own hockey card, but didn’t have the graphic design know-how to make that possible? I recently found out about Sportsnet’s Card Creator, a website where you can easily create your own free hockey cards in seconds.
How long is too long when waiting for a redemption card to arrive? Six months? A year? Two years? More? My most recent redemption took nearly four years of waiting, followed by four weeks of nagging, but it finally arrived.
Recently, in my never-ending request to clear the piles of cards off of my desk, I found a redemption card that I had redeemed long ago. This was supposed to get me an autographed Akim Aliu rookie card from the 2012-13 Panini Limited Hockey set. I opened a box of these cards way back in mid-2013, registered the redemption number via Panini’s website, and then forgot about it. So did Panini.
Continue reading “Panini America and My Long-Lost Redemption Card”
Fleer Showcase is the “I Love the 90s” set of hockey cards. Many of the inserts found in this set use the same design as, or inspired by, hockey cards of the 1990s, along with some football and basketball designs too. Here we have Fleer Ultra, Flair — spelled F-L-A-I-R — Showcase, Fleer Metal Universe and other inserts that would make most kids from the 1990s smile. Oh yeah, there is a base set and some hits too.
A box of 2016-17 Fleer Showcase costs around $72 USD online and has 18 packs. Each pack has five cards. Here is what I found in my latest box break:
Most hockey fans undoubtedly remember the 2012 movie Goon, which starred Sean William Scott as a bar bouncer who makes it onto a minor league hockey team because of his fighting prowess. That movie — which now has a sequel called Goon: Last of the Enforcers — is very loosely based on this book “Goon: The True Story of an Unlikely Journey into Minor League Hockey,” which came out a decade earlier and is currently out of print. Despite the dissimilarities between the movie and the book, “Goon” is a book worth tracking down.
Earlier this month, Upper Deck released a new set of American Hockey League trading cards. Like the 2014-15 and 2015-16 AHL sets, this year’s AHL set is sold in packs and consists of 100 base cards and 50 short-printed cards. (The inaugural 2014-15 Upper Deck AHL set was released as a 100-card boxed set.)
This year’s AHL set is a good mix of prospects who will make it in the NHL, players who have been up-and-down between the NHL and AHL, and players who have not played much in the NHL but excel in the “A.”
A box of 2016-17 Upper Deck AHL trading cards costs around $40 and contains 20 packs. Each pack has five cards. I recently opened a box. See the results of the break…after the break.
Teemu Selanne has a stellar hockey career. He scored 1,457 points in 1,451 games, won the Stanley Cup and had his number retired by the Anaheim Ducks. When he becomes eligible, he will undoubtedly be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. But despite all the goals, assists, awards and other accolades, The Finnish Flash could not get through his career without having at least one awful hockey card — the result of a free-agent signing while overseas and a hockey card company that refused to use Photoshop.
At first glance of Selanne’s card from the 2003-04 In The Game Action set, he appears to be underwater in one of those giant fish tanks you would find at a fancy restaurant; Continue reading “Teemu Selanne’s Worst Hockey Card”