If you’re just joining us, we’re working our way through five-card Larry Bird subset in the 1993 Action Packed Hall of Fame set. The first card, #17 in the set, was an overview of his career and we discussed the unusual fact that these five Larry Bird cards are the only cards in this Hall of Fame set where the person wasn’t actually in the the Hall of Fame at the time the set was printed. The second card is a great college card. Good info and, combined with the NCAA coach cards from the set, reminds us that this set might interest college collectors too. Now we arrive at the third card, #19, titled “Larry’s MVPs.”
Before addressing the MVPs, which are huge, I’m happy this card doesn’t skip his rookie season. The season before Bird arrived, the Celtics were last in the Atlantic Division and next-to-last in the NBA. Once Bird arrived in 1979-80, as the card says, they added 32 more wins, won the Atlantic Division, and Bird won Rookie of the Year. But let’s talk about these MVPs! Three-in-a-row! The card mentions that he joined “Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain as the only NBA players to win three consecutive MVP awards.” What the card doesn’t say is that the MVP was chosen in different ways at different times. Through 1979-80, the players voted. That’s when Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain won their three in a row. But after this, and when Bird won his, a panel of sportswriters and broadcasters voted. Remember the talk about how “they” wouldn’t let Nikola Jokic win three in a row. Agree or disagree, that’s who “they” are, and since they aren’t on the court that season, there is extra pressure if a choice is made with such historical significance. But back to Bird’s MVPs. There was 1984, a year when the Celtics won a championship. Then 1985, although the Celtics lost to the Lakers in the Finals this year. Then again in 1986, when the Celtics were again the champions even though Bird was dealing with a back injury. Russell, Chamberlain and Bird…still to this day the only three to win three in a row.
We’ll look at the final two Bird cards in this set a bit later. It looks like they’re really covering a lot of his career in depth. And if you’re not familiar with this set, these cards are very attractively designed! The cards are a valiant effort by Action Packed to produce something of high quality. They are thicker with rounded corners. The front has sculptured, raised image of the pictured players with the rest of the full-bleed photograph in an attractive flat, matte finish. The gold foil is intelligently integrated into the cards with a strip marking the 25th anniversary of the Basketball Hall of Fame and a small amount for the company name and name of the player. For the ’90’s junk wax era, they’re hard to beat. The set begins with a variety of subsets and, on our channel, we’ve looked at the first ten cards, a subset called “One on One” where pairs of HOFers that share a rivalry or common theme. Then we looked at all six coach cards in Series I, and now we’re reviewing our Larry Bird history with this five-card subset.
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