Three distinct Tim Hardaway photos, one card! Well, home jersey and away jersey… That’s gotta be two…
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This 1995-96 set is the second season for Fleer’s Flair brand. The design is very similar between the two sets especially the fact that both featured two photos of the player on the front of the card. When you get both home and away jerseys, it’s really neat. This #42 Tim Hardaway happened to feature both. But there’s a third photo on the back and we’re especially lucky with this card because we have an important third variation related to appearance. On the front, we have Tim Hardaway without hair, but on the back, we have him with hair. A fun feature in my opinion… Why we like particular cards doesn’t always have to be so deep, does it?
One thing that makes 1995-96 Flair different from the first Flair cards is the etched foil in the background. Because it blurs things and makes the background kind of abstract, this card really works! The basketball court makes a gold section that matches the Warriors uniform and there’s kind of a blue section right above that goes with the Warriors blue. The ’95-96 reverse is horizontal with a very simple design, so there’s not a lot of information on the back. Statistics on the right, action photo on the left and a bit of gold foil for the card number, team logo and player’s name. But for ’95-96, the statistics were printed on a black background so you can actually read them. The previous ’94-95 set, the photo on the back took up the entire reverse and it was sometimes hard to see the stats depending on where they fell in this image. So we get Tim Hardaway’s career-high 23.4 ppg in the ’91-92 season and we, unfortunately, get a reminder of his knee injury in ’93-94. By the way, if you’re wondering why the stats don’t add up, the statistics in this Flair set are partial stats.
The rest of this video will be about 1995-96 Flair in general rather than this particular card, so feel free to move on if you’re not interested in that. But this second season of Flair does have some things worth discussing. The set was easier to collect because there were only 250 cards (150 in the first series where this Tim Hardaway falls and 100 in the second). The previous year had 326. Flair reduced this number on purpose advertising that the set was limited to “recognized starters and top men off the bench.” Since ’94-95 Flair was a solid set, changes were very subtle for ’95-96. The structure was the same 30-point card stock (about twice as thick as a basic card) with polyester laminate. The cards still came in “hardpacks,” a protective box introduced the previous year, but now instead of ten cards for $4, you were getting nine cards for $4.99, so right away you’re going from an initial 40 cents a card to over 50 cents each.
If you’re interested in more discussion of ’95-96 Flair, we now have three cards in our video collection. You can find the Jordan from this set as well as the Kevin Garnett rookie.
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