deepbluejacket
Verified Trader,
Ah, trade stripes. One of the things that separates Pro Set from the other 1990-91 sets. Sure, Topps and OPC might have a little bit of text on the card, but Pro Set was the only set to draw attention to the new conditions. They can also tell us a little bit about when they went to press, depending upon who is striped and who isn't.
Series 1
Let's start with the celebrity trade stripes: Dale Hawerchuk, Phil Housley, Chris Chelios, and Denis Savard. They're celebrities because it was erroneously reported that these cards could be found without stripes. A few things I find interesting: Only Housley's bio acknowledges the reality of the situation. So does Scott Arniel's card, who was sent along with Housley to Winnipeg. Does this mean the Sabre bios were done after everyone else's? Or did they start updating bios from the start of the set and then just...give up?
Other fun fact. The trade stripes for the Hawerchuk deal all have the wrong date. Pro Set claims they were traded on 6/6, but they were actually traded on 6/16/90, the day of the Entry Draft. Joe Mullen was traded on the 16th too and Brad McCrimmon was dealt the day before. All these stripes say the 6th.
Joe Mullen comes with or without the trade stripe. This implies that Pro Set didn't realize Mullen had been dealt when they went to press. But they did know that Chris Nilan had gone to Boston on the 28th, and the Savard/Chelios swap on the 29th. Pro Set claims Nilan was traded on the 29th, but hey, back then there was no internet to lock these things down, so close enough.
Now that should have been the end of it. But at some point later on, Pro Set decided to update the status of two more players - Duane Sutter and Jari Kurri. Sutter gained a "Retired June 1990" stripe and Kurri got an update not only to his main card, but also to his All-Star card!
Kurri signed that deal on July 31st, so in theory...any transaction that occurred before 7/31/90 could have been updated in the set as well. But they didn't. John Tucker's return to Buffalo went unnoted. Carey Wilson's trade to Hartford went unremarked upon. Nor did a bigger move where Geoff Courtnall went to St. Louis for Peter Zezel and Mike Lalor, all of whom are in Series 1.
Series 2
The trade stripe is switched out in favor of a tag at the top of the card, typically with the theming of the card matching where the player now is, but the player in his former uniform.
There are 11 of these. Many of the players who have recently moved are featured in their current uniforms, so there is no need for a trade tag. So one would expect that these 11 were all traded close to their print deadline.
Not exactly.
Peter Zezel, as mentioned above, was traded in July. But Pro Set failed to secure a new photo, so they featured him in a Blues uni again, which defeats the purpose if you ask me. (Zezel continued on to Toronto in January of 1991, leaving a very slender window for Zezel Caps cards.)
With Sylvain Turgeon, Pro Set seemed to forget that he was traded from New Jersey - with whom he is featured in Series 1 - and reverted to his prior team.
Sometimes half of a trade will be featured in the new uniform, and half gets the trade stripe (Doug Smail and Don Barber, Mike Krushelnyski and John MacIntyre). In one instance, the trade came so late that the players were simply switched without re-ordering the set based on alphabetical order. Chris Dahlquist and Pete Taglianetti were swapped for each other on December 11th and Pro Set hurriedly tagged and renumbered them. Two days later Jiri Hrdina went from Calgary to Pittsburgh, and Pro Set surrendered and left him where he was, still themed to Calgary. But they did tag him.
So if December 13th is the cutoff, why wasn't the Ray Ferraro/Doug Crossman deal acknowledged? That happened a full month earlier.
Anyway, I bring all this stuff up now because it will serve as a primer for a later post this week, when I make wild speculations about which card is truly the last card included in Series 2.
Mike
