deepbluejacket
Verified Trader,
Surprised? Yes, I have on occasion collected cards beyond 1993. The 2001-02 season marked my return to the present. I had more or less stopped collecting the current season after 1994 and when I returned to the hobby, the wonder of eBay allowed me to attack with vigor the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. I stayed away from new releases.
I don't really remember what led me back into the fray, but I returned by collecting Pacific, Topps Heritage, and SP Authentic.
2001-02 was not a good year to return to the present. I mark it as the last of a block of bad years where the cost of cards went way up and the value stayed the same. This is in part due to a weaker crop of rookies. The years between '98 and '02 are legion with busts. Patrik Stefan! Milan Kraft! Pavel Brendl! It took a long time for the Sedins to ignite, and many others had decent careers but nothing close to expectations (Rick DiPietro, for example.)
The 2001-02 season basically had one player going for it - Ilya Kovalchuk. The 1st overall pick of the Atlanta Thrashers was the guaranteed superstar we'd been waiting for, and SP Authentic looked to be one of the best rookie cards on the table - Autographed and serial numbered to just 900.
*Per usual, all images will be coming from COMC. I own copies of all but Kovalchuk.
2001-02 SP Authentic - [Base] #175 - Ilya Kovalchuk /900
Courtesy of COMC.com
Maybe I was tired of wading in the kiddie pool. But for the first time, I bought a box of cards where the SRP was $5 a pack. I bought 2001-02 SP Authentic.
The 2001-02 iteration of SP Authentic was a departure from the prior year. While it still had 90 base cards, it decided not to dilute the rookie cards by including every bozo to have dressed up that season. They dropped the RCs from 75 to 50 and introduced All Time Great and Future Great cards. These subsets gave Upper Deck the opportunity to issue multiple cards of superstars and include retired players like Gretzky and Bourque. It is unclear what the Future Greats gave them other than an opportunity to showcase last year's rookies again and be laughed at by generations to come for their failure to prognosticate. In some alternate universe, Mike Van Ryn and Kris Beech became first ballot hall of famers, but not here.
The big upgrade came with the autographed rookie cards. SPA's reputation was being built upon its Sign of the Times inserts, and including autographed true rookie cards was a huge lure. Six rookies were deemed important enough to get that treatment, including Kovalchuk.
In addition to the regular set, there were SP Limited parallels of everything to 150 (Bronze) and 25 (Gold). The Sign of the Times came in singles, doubles (/150) and triples (/25) as in the prior year. Buybacks returned as well in scarce quantities. Finally, SPA had a jersey set called Notable Numbers which were numbered to a significant number in the player's career.
The odds were more or less unknown. Upper Deck used the word "odds" on the box, but then merely told you how many copies of each type of card existed without putting it in any context (which would help them in 2005-06 when they royally effed up the release.)
But we can do a back of the envelope calculation. If I presume that almost all of the cards that I still own from that set came from one box, then we can speculate. The All Time and Future Great cards are numbered to 3500 each. There are 40 of them in total. My box yielded 8 of those cards. That would put us at around 17500 boxes. There are 50 rookie cards at 900 copies each, and it looks like I pulled 3. That works out to 15000 boxes. I pulled a Limited ATG, which potentially reduced that total by 1, but we have a general ballpark. (Adding up all the jersey cards puts us at 19,280 boxes if we presume one hit per box.)
All right, so as I said, this was a major investment for me. Five dollars a pack was not chump change. But I'd been lured in by a solo pack I had bought. I wanted to test the waters a bit, and I managed to beat the odds by pulling an SP Limited version of Peter Smrek!
Peter Smrek!
Or was it Peter Smreh? It was really hard to tell. The font on these cards made Ks and Hs look quite similar, and I'd never heard of Peter Smrek/Smreh. If I had, I may have backed off a bit. Smrek was a former 3rd round pick of St. Louis who had been dealt to NYR for the proverbial bag of pucks (a 36 year old Alexei Gusarov). By the time I got this card, he had played every game in the NHL that he would ever play. But I must admit...it encouraged me. A card numbered to 150 in 2002 still seemed impossibly rare. All those SP Limited set collectors would now have to contend with me if they wanted their precious Smrek/Smreh.
So I bought a box. I would guess I paid close to the full $120 once state taxes were calculated. I told myself that I should slowly open it, maybe one pack a night to really savor it. That lasted all of 2 nights.
Before we get into the box break, let's again revisit what we could hope to find in here. Obviously, I wanted at least a base set out of it, and with only 90 cards in it, that seemed probable despite there being a maximum of 120 cards in the box. I certainly wanted Kovalchuk, but I'd take any one of the auto rookies. But beyond those auto rookies, the rest of the field looked mighty barren. I didn't yet know that Pavel Datsyuk was anyone to be concerned about. The lone hometown Bruin to acquire was Ivan Huml. As for Sign of the Times, for every star player I might want there was a Brent Sopel or Jochen Hecht to dodge. I wasn't sure if a jersey card would hit in each box.
Hmmm...was this really a good use of $120?
Box Break
Base set: Complete!
All Time Greats: Bourque, Belfour, Brodeur
Future Greats: Heatley, Williams, Gaborik, Stuart, Belanger
Rookies: Ivan Huml (hey, I got the Bruin!), Pavel Skrbek, Vaclav Pletka
SP Limited: Hasek ATG
Sign of the Times: Gaborik
Notable Number: Mario Lemieux, white swatch, numbered to 648
So it could have been a lot worse, but it was not exactly $120 great. I seemed to be really reveling in Czechoslovakia, as all my rookies hailed from there (including Smrek) as did Gaborik. At this point, it's time for a Czechoslovakia sidebar!
Sidebar!
As we all know, Czechoslovakia broke up into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in the early 90s, but every player in this set was born under the former nation. Upper Deck is very inconsistent about places of birth. For example, Skrbek, Pletka, and Smrek are all listed as having been born in Czechoslovakia. However, Huml's place of birth is listed as the Czech Republic. Why? Perhaps it was because he was born in Klatno, birthplace of Jaromir Jagr. Upper Deck knows Jagr is a Czech, and lists him as being born in Klatno, Czech Republic. Marian Gaborik is listed as being born in Trencin, Slovakia. This implies that if you're a player worth knowing, someone in Carlsbad would crack an atlas for you. Except Dominik Hasek is listed as born in...Czechoslovakia. Oh well. (Heatley is listed as born in West Germany. The Cold War continues in SP Authentic.)
End Sidebar!
So did I feel I got my money's worth? Not really, even though I'd gotten my first jersey card of a bonafide superstar in Mario Lemieux. No, the reason for me feeling this way is not what you'd expect. I was upset with the lack of care put into the base set.
Yeah, the base set.
Observe:
All of these cards have blatant errors. Drury has no position on card front. Iginla's bio has the word "FR ST" instead of "first" - twice. Patrick Freaking Roy's name is spelled wrong!!!
I had just spent $120 for 120 cards - one dollar per card - and Upper Deck clearly - undeniably - could not be bothered to do a final proof of the set. These errors were of the blatant, no one gives an eff Pro Set level of carelessness. I was offended.
I still am.
Ultimately I chose not to pursue the set any further. In fact, I never bought another box of SP Authentic again. Which is a shame because I do like the set, but if there's anything I want out of it, it makes more sense to just buy the cards on the market. And I've learned the lesson so well, that I've only bought one other hobby box of anything with an SRP of $5 per pack again.
2005-06 Ice.
Yeah, I'm not very good at this!**
Anyway, 2001-02 SPA's legacy is that it was the last of the meh releases. All those other auto'd RCs - Vaclav Nedorost, Dan Blackburn, Raffi Torres, Kristian Huselius, and Krys Kolanos - are basically footnotes. Of the other 44, only Datsyuk is worth anything (Sorry, Erik Cole.)
But this set still serves as a bridge to the product we know today. The following season would see autographed RCs expanded to 21 players including Nash, Spezza, and Zetterberg. The count would jump to 90 in the 2005-06 set. SPA is basically the flagship of the next tier up over Series 1 and 2 and as such, it probably gets that extra proofread these days.
Mike
**I got the Ice box on the cheap, after it became clear there was way too much of it and not nearly enough inside of it. But it's a funny coda nonetheless.
I don't really remember what led me back into the fray, but I returned by collecting Pacific, Topps Heritage, and SP Authentic.
2001-02 was not a good year to return to the present. I mark it as the last of a block of bad years where the cost of cards went way up and the value stayed the same. This is in part due to a weaker crop of rookies. The years between '98 and '02 are legion with busts. Patrik Stefan! Milan Kraft! Pavel Brendl! It took a long time for the Sedins to ignite, and many others had decent careers but nothing close to expectations (Rick DiPietro, for example.)
The 2001-02 season basically had one player going for it - Ilya Kovalchuk. The 1st overall pick of the Atlanta Thrashers was the guaranteed superstar we'd been waiting for, and SP Authentic looked to be one of the best rookie cards on the table - Autographed and serial numbered to just 900.
*Per usual, all images will be coming from COMC. I own copies of all but Kovalchuk.
2001-02 SP Authentic - [Base] #175 - Ilya Kovalchuk /900
Courtesy of COMC.com
Maybe I was tired of wading in the kiddie pool. But for the first time, I bought a box of cards where the SRP was $5 a pack. I bought 2001-02 SP Authentic.
The 2001-02 iteration of SP Authentic was a departure from the prior year. While it still had 90 base cards, it decided not to dilute the rookie cards by including every bozo to have dressed up that season. They dropped the RCs from 75 to 50 and introduced All Time Great and Future Great cards. These subsets gave Upper Deck the opportunity to issue multiple cards of superstars and include retired players like Gretzky and Bourque. It is unclear what the Future Greats gave them other than an opportunity to showcase last year's rookies again and be laughed at by generations to come for their failure to prognosticate. In some alternate universe, Mike Van Ryn and Kris Beech became first ballot hall of famers, but not here.
The big upgrade came with the autographed rookie cards. SPA's reputation was being built upon its Sign of the Times inserts, and including autographed true rookie cards was a huge lure. Six rookies were deemed important enough to get that treatment, including Kovalchuk.
In addition to the regular set, there were SP Limited parallels of everything to 150 (Bronze) and 25 (Gold). The Sign of the Times came in singles, doubles (/150) and triples (/25) as in the prior year. Buybacks returned as well in scarce quantities. Finally, SPA had a jersey set called Notable Numbers which were numbered to a significant number in the player's career.
The odds were more or less unknown. Upper Deck used the word "odds" on the box, but then merely told you how many copies of each type of card existed without putting it in any context (which would help them in 2005-06 when they royally effed up the release.)
But we can do a back of the envelope calculation. If I presume that almost all of the cards that I still own from that set came from one box, then we can speculate. The All Time and Future Great cards are numbered to 3500 each. There are 40 of them in total. My box yielded 8 of those cards. That would put us at around 17500 boxes. There are 50 rookie cards at 900 copies each, and it looks like I pulled 3. That works out to 15000 boxes. I pulled a Limited ATG, which potentially reduced that total by 1, but we have a general ballpark. (Adding up all the jersey cards puts us at 19,280 boxes if we presume one hit per box.)
All right, so as I said, this was a major investment for me. Five dollars a pack was not chump change. But I'd been lured in by a solo pack I had bought. I wanted to test the waters a bit, and I managed to beat the odds by pulling an SP Limited version of Peter Smrek!
Peter Smrek!
Or was it Peter Smreh? It was really hard to tell. The font on these cards made Ks and Hs look quite similar, and I'd never heard of Peter Smrek/Smreh. If I had, I may have backed off a bit. Smrek was a former 3rd round pick of St. Louis who had been dealt to NYR for the proverbial bag of pucks (a 36 year old Alexei Gusarov). By the time I got this card, he had played every game in the NHL that he would ever play. But I must admit...it encouraged me. A card numbered to 150 in 2002 still seemed impossibly rare. All those SP Limited set collectors would now have to contend with me if they wanted their precious Smrek/Smreh.
So I bought a box. I would guess I paid close to the full $120 once state taxes were calculated. I told myself that I should slowly open it, maybe one pack a night to really savor it. That lasted all of 2 nights.
Before we get into the box break, let's again revisit what we could hope to find in here. Obviously, I wanted at least a base set out of it, and with only 90 cards in it, that seemed probable despite there being a maximum of 120 cards in the box. I certainly wanted Kovalchuk, but I'd take any one of the auto rookies. But beyond those auto rookies, the rest of the field looked mighty barren. I didn't yet know that Pavel Datsyuk was anyone to be concerned about. The lone hometown Bruin to acquire was Ivan Huml. As for Sign of the Times, for every star player I might want there was a Brent Sopel or Jochen Hecht to dodge. I wasn't sure if a jersey card would hit in each box.
Hmmm...was this really a good use of $120?
Box Break
Base set: Complete!
All Time Greats: Bourque, Belfour, Brodeur
Future Greats: Heatley, Williams, Gaborik, Stuart, Belanger
Rookies: Ivan Huml (hey, I got the Bruin!), Pavel Skrbek, Vaclav Pletka
SP Limited: Hasek ATG
Sign of the Times: Gaborik
Notable Number: Mario Lemieux, white swatch, numbered to 648
So it could have been a lot worse, but it was not exactly $120 great. I seemed to be really reveling in Czechoslovakia, as all my rookies hailed from there (including Smrek) as did Gaborik. At this point, it's time for a Czechoslovakia sidebar!
Sidebar!
As we all know, Czechoslovakia broke up into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in the early 90s, but every player in this set was born under the former nation. Upper Deck is very inconsistent about places of birth. For example, Skrbek, Pletka, and Smrek are all listed as having been born in Czechoslovakia. However, Huml's place of birth is listed as the Czech Republic. Why? Perhaps it was because he was born in Klatno, birthplace of Jaromir Jagr. Upper Deck knows Jagr is a Czech, and lists him as being born in Klatno, Czech Republic. Marian Gaborik is listed as being born in Trencin, Slovakia. This implies that if you're a player worth knowing, someone in Carlsbad would crack an atlas for you. Except Dominik Hasek is listed as born in...Czechoslovakia. Oh well. (Heatley is listed as born in West Germany. The Cold War continues in SP Authentic.)
End Sidebar!
So did I feel I got my money's worth? Not really, even though I'd gotten my first jersey card of a bonafide superstar in Mario Lemieux. No, the reason for me feeling this way is not what you'd expect. I was upset with the lack of care put into the base set.
Yeah, the base set.
Observe:
All of these cards have blatant errors. Drury has no position on card front. Iginla's bio has the word "FR ST" instead of "first" - twice. Patrick Freaking Roy's name is spelled wrong!!!
I had just spent $120 for 120 cards - one dollar per card - and Upper Deck clearly - undeniably - could not be bothered to do a final proof of the set. These errors were of the blatant, no one gives an eff Pro Set level of carelessness. I was offended.
I still am.
Ultimately I chose not to pursue the set any further. In fact, I never bought another box of SP Authentic again. Which is a shame because I do like the set, but if there's anything I want out of it, it makes more sense to just buy the cards on the market. And I've learned the lesson so well, that I've only bought one other hobby box of anything with an SRP of $5 per pack again.
2005-06 Ice.
Yeah, I'm not very good at this!**
Anyway, 2001-02 SPA's legacy is that it was the last of the meh releases. All those other auto'd RCs - Vaclav Nedorost, Dan Blackburn, Raffi Torres, Kristian Huselius, and Krys Kolanos - are basically footnotes. Of the other 44, only Datsyuk is worth anything (Sorry, Erik Cole.)
But this set still serves as a bridge to the product we know today. The following season would see autographed RCs expanded to 21 players including Nash, Spezza, and Zetterberg. The count would jump to 90 in the 2005-06 set. SPA is basically the flagship of the next tier up over Series 1 and 2 and as such, it probably gets that extra proofread these days.
Mike
**I got the Ice box on the cheap, after it became clear there was way too much of it and not nearly enough inside of it. But it's a funny coda nonetheless.
wned::beer:
