Welcome to Cataloged Clutter where we’re making a video for every basketball card we can get our hands on, but mainly overlooked cards…common cards, junk wax, minor stars, printing variations.
Before we start mourning the loss of the glowing basketball, let me show you a cool statistic on the back of this card. Like the card says, Garnett was “improving his production in almost every category” during his second year. But look at something that didn’t improve, his 3-pointer percentage. Exactly .286 two seasons in a row. Pretty neat to hit that exactly on the number like that. His first year he was 8/28, then the next year he was 6/21 keeping that percentage spot on! But we have to talk about this basketball…
This is the first card we’re looking at from 1997-98 Skybox Premium, and everyone, this is the end of an era. The glowing basketball disappeared. It was there at the beginning of Skybox in ’90-91, a bit more yellow in ’91-92, still there in ’92-93 as the background returned to reality, ’93-94, ’94-95, no apologies at all as the ball was completely on fire in ’95-96, ’96-97 the glow is more white…but it’s gone now. This is the end, 1997-98 Skybox Premium. So that’s about it for this video everyone, just sad that the glowing ball has disappeared.
Skybox was trying out other cool things. The cards were 20 pt. stock, just a bit thicker than standard, so they had a higher quality feel. That probably helped with other neat elements like the raised player’s name (you can actually see on the back where it is pressed up). But even the team name is raised slightly, so nice texture there. The packs referred to this as “embossed holographic foil.” And this design was what this set is all about. Two series of 125 cards each and take Series I where this card comes from for instance, just 123 cards and two checklists. No subsets, no variation… Staying with their roots of an isolated action shot of the player overlaid on a computerized background, although hints of the original photo come through the blurred with a color border.
There were parallel cards called Rubies, but you only had 50 of each card printed, so good luck with that. Also of note, Autographics cards, which were scattered among Hoops/Skybox sets, were inserted into these packs this season. Improvement everywhere during second year. 3P% exact 8/28 and then 6/21.
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