These are not Olympic basketball cards! See the price guide picture in the attached picture…even professional publications get this confused! Between Olympics, the International Basketball Federation hosts a large tournament called the World Championship. In fact, in the 1990 World Championship, USA lost to Yugoslavia in the semifinals. But starting in 1992, professionals were now permitted to play both the Olympics and this World Championship. So these cards represent the USA basketball team that was put together for the 1994 World Championship held in Toronto. To show the depth of talent in the USA, an entirely new roster of players was created with players not present at the 1992 Olympics. They were referred to as Dream Team II and easily won the tournament.
Upper Deck produced this set of 90-cards in ten-card packs within 36-pack boxes. Do the multiplication there…you’re going to have a lot of base card duplicates if you open a box of these. Every player has six cards in the set except Kevin Johnson. He didn’t make the set for some reason. The first of these six cards for each player is a subset called “Player’s Quote Book.” Here you’re looking at the first Joe Dumars card, #7 in the set. The subset is displayed in blue along the left edge of the card. This blue makes up most of the background on the back where we have two more photos of the player, some information (Where we’re reminded that Dumars was the 1989 Finals MVP) and, of course, we have a quote…hence the name of this subset, “Player’s Quote Book.” Here, Dumars says, “Between the opportunity to win a gold medal and to play with this bunch of players, it was something I couldn’t pass up.” This subset also featured a gold facsimile signature of the player, a nice touch.
So there we have it, our first 1994 Upper Deck USA basketball card. Not an Olympic card, but an interesting set between ’93-94 and ’94-95 Upper Deck that is often overlooked.
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