1990-91 NBA Hoops

The Michael Jordan 90s were an exciting time to be growing up a basketball fan - even a Warriors fan - and basketball card collecting swept through my class around the time we hit 10 years old. I had two regular haunts for buying cards in the late 90s, both of them in the Inner Sunset. The first went out of business not long after I started collecting there, and was soon replaced by the original Craigslist office. Prior to shuttering its doors, this shop had sold an up-to-date inventory that supplied me with nearly all the contemporary cards I owned. My other supplier was down the block, an odds and ends purveyor called the Oriental Art Gallery (profiled here). Unlike the competition it left behind, the Oriental Art Gallery was a cluttered, dimly-lit room with a smell characterized only slightly more by incense than by old merchandise. Untouched by time, sports and entertainment cards from the late 80s were sold as though they'd been released the week before. (See photo - as of 2016, they still are!) My favorite set was 1990-91 NBA Hoops: stately in gray arches on the face, with well-selected stats and biographical trivia on the reverse. The rosters, too, were fascinating to look back on even then, with Dream Teamers suiting up alongside the kind of lumbering relics who within a decade would have no place in the NBA.

At some point, I stopped collecting basketball cards, but the gray arches and soon obsolete team logos were never far from my mind. I recently decided to look into rebuying 1990-91 NBA Hoops and found the whole set on eBay for $8. With the help of the internet, I learned about the set's many variants and oddities. The most notable is #223: Sam Vincent, then playing for the Orlando Magic at the tail end of an unremarkable 7 year career. Hoops' first version of the Vincent card featured a photo taken during a home game against the Bulls, which happened to be the Valentine's Day, 1990 game in which Michael Jordan's jersey was stolen prior to tipoff; the first and only time Jordan wore #12 is immortalized on the obverse of the card. For unknown reasons, this first version of the Vincent card was discontinued and replaced with a generic photo of Vincent dribbling. Other formatting errors and variations are less substantial, and the different versions of each vary in rarity.

In addition to the core 440 cards in the set, Hoops produced an unnumbered All-Rookie Team card featuring David Robinson on the face receiving his Rookie of the Year award, along with four other standout rookies on the reverse: legends Vlade Divac and Tim Hardaway, plus Pooh Richardson and Sherman Douglas. The card was available only by a mail-in offer on the back of packs of cards. The offer expired on July 30, 1991. Two card variants exist - one with only pictures of the four additional rookies on the reverse, and one with abbreviated rookie year stats added for each of the five featured players. The latter is less common. Like all other cards in the set, either version of this one registers just a tick above valueless.

Two additional sets of oddities exist, as well. The first includes a variety of uncut strips or sheets of (typically unnumbered) cards given away at games as promotional items. One example was a Taco Bell promotion at the LA Forum, which paired several sets of 3-card strips with a mail-in sweepstakes coupon for Laker tickets or Taco Bell prizes. This contest ran from January 28 to February 28, 1991. The second was a series of 58 Announcer cards, produced in unknown quantities and distributed to the announcers themselves and friends of the company as favors. These are especially uncommon, and uniquely for the set, demand high prices when they do surface.

Acquiring these cards 15+ years after I first collected them has been very enjoyable. On a personal level, it's allowed me to revisit a wonderful facet of my childhood and some of the unusual aspects of San Francisco that are slowly (and sadly) fading away. The observational experience has been similar from the perspective of a lifelong basketball fan: it's a game, and a culture, that for better and for worse has irrevocably changed.

The 1990-91 NBA Hoops set can be seen here. (Images will be added sporadically as I complete the scans.)