Cardboard hoopsters

It's only taken me two months to do so, but I'm finally getting to the last of my purchases from the giant card show back in September.

In the couple of years of now that I've been going to the Nashville shows, I'm always still a little amazed at just how many 90's basketball inserts there are to be had in the bargain boxes, and that's just at the regular twice a month shows, the numbers increase tenfold at these twice a year baby Nationals.

So as per usual, I brought home a ton of cheap inserts, so some of you might consider this to be a little too long of post -- but for those of you who fall into the less is more camp, you'll be happy to know that I did do quite a bit of whittling, otherwise I probably would've had enough for at least three posts.

Big shows means that some of the big-time vintage dealers show up (the one's who set up at The National), and while their prices aren't always the best, I still tend to look through their offerings just in case. This time I was able to find a couple of reasonably priced set needs, so it did end up being well worth the look (the '74 Clyde Lee has been a pain in my side for a while now). With these most recent additions, I'm down to needing 14 from the '72-73 set, and just 4 from the '74-75 set (those 4 will probably get gotten during the upcoming COMC Black Friday sale).

Going into this show I didn't have any of these 1992-92 Fleer All-Stars, now I have 9 (Michael Adams got left out of the scan)!

A nice selection of early to almost mid 90's inserts. The Hornacek and Malone Beam Team's are of the Member's only variety.

I don't know what the deal is, but it seems like there have been a lot of Shaq inserts to be had at the last 5 or 6 shows that I've been to now. I wasn't really ever a fan of his, but I'm not about to walk away from his inserts, especially when they're priced at 20 cents or less (even if they don't scan very well).

At some point I started finding a bunch of these 1994-95 Fleer Ultra Rebound King's in a 6/$1 box, so of course I started adding them to my stack, it wasn't until after I got home that I realized that I had gotten the entire 10-card set (Keven Willis isn't shown). It's certainly not a high-end insert set, but it was still kind of neat to be able to get the whole set.

[Note to self: don't bother trying to scan any 1997-98 Hoops Chairman of the Board cards in the future, no matter what you do, they'll still just end up looking like hot s***]

One of my favorite basketball inserts of all time are these 1995-96 SP die-cut All-Stars. I think this is like the third Stoudamire that I have, but I did manage to get a gold Vin Baker that I didn't have.

Sometimes when you're looking through Jim's bargain boxes, you will hit patches of certain players, and I'm not gonna lie, I absolutely love it when that happens! At this particular show I ran into a stretch of Scottie Pippen (only half are shown), and...

... Hakeem Olajuwon! I also hit a patch of Mark Sanchez on the football side of things, left those for somebody else though :) Oh, and speaking of Hakeem...

I found a pair of these 1994-95 Skybox Emotion Ntense's in a different dealers $1 box, which made these my only "expensive" insert purchases of the day. This a set that I really like, but since I don't have the MJ, and I'd never pay the $100+ that it would take to get it, I don't think I'll ever have to worry about trying to complete it.

Just a few assorted mid to late 90's inserts, the Garnett Best Cuts sure didn't scan well.

Until just a couple of months ago I had been working on all of the Parallels from the 2013-14 Prizm set, as well as the 2014-15 and 2015-16 sets, but with the ridiculous prices that the rookies are selling for (I'm not paying over $100 for a kid who's yet to accomplish anything of note), I decided to pare back the collection and just work on some specific players (mostly of the retired variety). I really wish I would've been collecting these like this all along, I probably would've had a lot more fun doing so over the last couple of years... better late than never?


Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.