Cardpocalypse #4 - Favorite Basketball Card

Day 3 of the Cardpocalypse challenge!  Today's topic is:

Favorite basketball card in your collection

OK, this was a little harder than yesterday's Football Card post. So many cool basketball cards!! So I will be showing a few cards on the way to my favorite.  

No Michael or Kobe in this post. They have some great cards, but I likes what I likes. And the cards I will show are not all big dollar cards.  But since when does a card have to have a big 'book value' to be anyone's favorite???

Runner up:  Shawn Kemp cards!!

I really loved Kemp for the first few years of his career.  SO raw and powerful!!  I still keep an old video clip of him dunking over Alton Lister and doing his crouch and point thing after.  I giggle every time. If you weren't around for that or don't remember, go take a watch.  The dunk is at about 15 seconds in. 

Couldn't pick a single Kemp card that speaks to me, so I grabbed the 2 early cards of him that give me the most nostalgic feels and 2 extremely cool looking inserts.

Next runner up:  Spud Webb RC!

This card needs an upgrade, but even when I get the upgrade, I will keep them both.  And if I got another, I'd keep it too.  Because I love this card!!

This is of course, a shot from the 86 dunk contest, which Spud won over another favorite of mine, Dominique Wilkins.  Spud is exactly my height.  So I figured that I should be able to dunk.  Makes perfect sense.  Except, for some reason, it never happened, but not for lack of trying.  I guess I will have to live vicariously through this card!!

Next runner up - Two very different Scottie Pippens!


The first Pippen is a favorite because of the straight up Metal coolness of it.  I loved this card long before the love of Fleer Metal cards that is going on in the hobby right now.  I like the layout of the card with the metal border and rivets.  It;s enough to showcase the middle of the card, but still leaves enough real estate for the action.  And the color and pop of the card in person is wonderful.  The scanner didn't do that bad of a job on this one either, unlike some Metal cards.

The next Scottie is from the era of Junk wax.  But it was a pretty tough pull nonetheless! Wild Card!!

The 1000 stripe was the highest value produced.  Nobody knows how many, but not many came in packs.  If I remember right, you could get a number of a card, say 10, and send them in to Wild Card in exchange for a copy of that card with a 10 stripe.  Or if you had 100, you could send them in for a 100 stripe.  And so on.  So there were 2 ways to get this 1000 stripe Pippen.  One is to pull it from a pack, which from what I read, was next to impossible.  Or buy enough Wild Card packs to accumulate 1000 Scottie Pippens and send them in for one of these:

Super cool in my book, even if it wouldn't probably sell for a ton.



OK!  You made it through my ramblings!  Ready for the favorite basketball card in my collection???

So I have always had a thing for Hakeem Olajuwon.  I think he is massively underrated.  I think he should be in every conversation about the best big men ever.  And he entertained me!  So many jukes and jives!!

Anyway, a number of years ago, I was looking at Olajuwons on the Bay, and the Big Men On Court insert popped up.  I didn't collect in the later 90's, so it was new to me.  Now I have never really been one to plop down real money on cards, so the $10 price tag was a deterrent.  But once I realized that this card could not be had any cheaper, I decided to pull the trigger.  And I am so happy that I did!!  So, my favorite basketball card in my collection:

I know this is probably a futile request, but if anyone out there has any cards from this Big Man On Court set and is willing to trade, I would be interested.  They have gone up in price a lot, so I don't know if I have the cards necessary to trade for them, but I would love the opportunity!