It's done this time!

I don't know how long ago it was now, but some years ago I got the last card I needed, John Havlicek, to complete the 1976-77 Topps basketball set, did a blog post to proclaim it's completion, and if I recall correctly, received a collective yawn. 

I know that blog folks don't care about basketball cards, so the crickets were no surprise, but as it would turn out, those chirps were premature. 

At the time of it's completion, I had the set in a binder, but in an effort to free up some space, I moved to a box (one of those graded card boxes that COMC always sends my stuff in) shortly thereafter. Fast forward a handful of years, and I decided that I wanted to put it back in a binder, which I did, only to find that something was eschew; namely that I was missing a card, #21 Steve Mix. At first I thought maybe I had just put the cards away originally slightly out of order, but a couple of passes through my "completed" set told me that that wasn't the case. As big as these cards are, there's no way I could've misplaced one, so it was obvious that an oversight had occurred and I was still one card away from completing the set.

I have a decent amount of duplicates from the set, but as you can probably imagine, no Steve Mix. The only thing left to do was to hit the interwebs in search of my needed card. And boy was that fun. Given their size, and the fact that they're "vintage" basketball, which apparently has become considerably more desirable since the boom started, not to mention increased postage costs in recent years, and you get a perfect recipe for a lot of overpriced singles. After halfheartedly looking off and on for a few months, I finally settled on the above copy from COMC for $2.48, which just recently arrived along with 36 other cards that I had shipped for just a couple of bucks thanks to the $5 shipping coupon that they gave me after taking a ridiculous amount of time to send the previous order (this one took "only" six weeks). 

Considering that this set is loaded with HOFers (some of whom have two cards), Steve Mix was an unlikely fellow to need last (Hondo made a lot more sense), but oh well, it's done. And this time I'm sure!

But wait, there's more...

I have a number of other vintage basketball sets in progress, or at least I do now, again. I hadn't added any cards to these builds for a few years, probably since before the boom started. In fact, prior to just a couple of months ago, most of them had been long since been cannibalized for player collections. But, as I mentioned in the previous post, I've started rethinking a lot of my player collections, which has led me to put all of my old basketball set builds back together (minus the couple of cards that I gave to someone else so that they could finish two of their sets -- those I'll have to re-buy).

Now that all of these sets are back on, I'd very much like to be done with them; just one thing less to have to look for. A lot of the prices on COMC have gone up considerably since the last time I looked to add any cards to my sets, but even so, I've been able to find a few cards in recent months whose prices were more akin to what they used to be. 19 of the 37 cards in my most recent shipment ended up being of the vintage basketball variety.

The oldest basketball set that I'm working on is the '69-70 set. Finding four that I need for less than $2 apiece seemed like a pretty good deal in today's market. Bob Boozer, who was just coming off his best season (21.7 PPG with Chicago), is the highlight here.

Number of cards now needed to complete: 32

This is probably the cheapest of the league leader cards from the '70-71 set. And poor Darrall Imhoff, he was given one of the all-time worst photos on this card (Jerry Sloan's card in this set is even worse).

He's not talked about much anymore, if at all, but Jeff Mullins had a really solid stretch of about 5-6 years there with the Warriors. 

I thought for sure that I'd be able to add a few more needs from this set, but alas, two was all that I was able to manage.

Number of cards now needed to complete: 40

Having been so many years since I last worked on it, I was a bit surprised to find that I still needed so many from the '72-73 set. Thankfully, I was able to get all of the most expensive cards long before they jumped in price. Some big names here up on that first row. At around $2.50, Mel Daniels was the most expensive one from this group. Merv Jackson was a much needed upgrade.

Like the year before, the '72-73 set has separate checklists for the NBA and ABA, and for reasons unknown to me, the NBA checklist from the '72-73 set has gotten quite expensive. This one showed up on the site for like $17, which there was no way I was gonna pay that much for a checklist, but a few weeks later it went on sale for $5, and while that seemed like an awful lot, compared to sold prices on the eBay, it was actually quite reasonable. Obviously I ponied up the five bucks for it. I believe that this was the most expensive card left that I need.

Number of cards now needed to complete: 11

Similar to the '72-73 set, I thought I only needed 2-3 from the '75-76 set, but that number turned out to be 10; half of which I was able mark off with this order.

The Bulls had an awful lot of talent on their roster during the mid 70's, unfortunately for them, a number of teams had more.

Number of cards now needed to complete: 5

But wait... there's even more!

The '77-78 offering is my least favorite vintage basketball set, and as such, I've never put a lot of effort into completing it (either in white or grey back form). That being said, I couldn't pass on this very reasonably priced Robert Parish rookie (white back) that I saw on Sportlots. Cards from this set always scan poorly, so you'll have to take my word for it when I say that it's even nicer than I thought it would be. Despite my not being a huge fan of it, I am now making a bit of a push to complete the set, if only so that I can say at some point that I've got a complete run of 70's basketball sets. This was by far the most expensive card left for this set that I needed.

Number of cards now needed to complete: 45

It's a lofty goal, but I'm hoping by year's end that I'll be able to complete at least one of the sets seen in this post, or one of the two that wasn't, those being '71-72 (14 needed) and '74-75 (4 needed).