The 1996-97 season was full of celebrations, marketing and merchandise for the 50th anniversary of the NBA. The parallel set for this ’96-97 Topps was an NBA 50th parallel set, but even with the base set, the historical year made it appropriate to stick to a classical design and Topps certainly did this. White border surrounding an action photo…just a hint of gold foil for the brand logo and player’s name. Not even the team name or position appeared on this simplified front. Great selection for a photo with Michael Jordan going up against no less than Alonzo Mourning. I assume the left hand worked out for him here, he’s looking pretty confident! It also made sense to stick to simplicity with the base cards because this was the first season of Topps Chrome, which basically produced another parallel of this card. So in addition to this base, and the NBA 50th parallel that we already mentioned, there was the Chrome version and a Chrome Refractor. With four versions of this card, the base card is naturally often overlooked and often quite affordable.
Second smaller photo on the horizontal back with the traditional components, biographical info near the card number, complete NBA stats and a small piece of information at the bottom. Thankfully, Topps kept their league leader indicators in the stats, something they had been doing since Topps reappeared in basketball cards in ’92-93. If a player led the league, that stat would be in bold and it’s impressive to look down the points and ppg columns and see how dominant Jordan was. Great streak shown and he showed he truly was back from retirement by doing it again with the first full season back in ’95-96. Important piece of information too…he was the first ever with four Finals MVP’s. There would be two more added to that by the way. Just a side note, does anyone know what that small “A” in the bottom-left corner is? We saw small A’s and B’s in other Topps sets and couldn’t quite exactly figure it out.
Topps, like most other companies, continued to condense the number of cards in the base set. This season was a 111 card Series I and a 110-card Series II for a total of 221 cards, 70 cards less than the previous season.
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