Pack of the Day 96: A Box of 2012-13 Panini Basketball

I opened this stuff last year, but the post is in the queue and I might as well write it now. Dave and Adam's Card World had some decent deals during their Black Friday / Cyber Monday sale and I took advantage of some of them. One of the things I ordered is a Hobby box of 2012-13 Panini Basketball. Each box promises 7 Knight parallels and 2 autographs, along with cards from a handful of insert sets.

The base card design kind of resembles the NBA Hoops cards of the early 90's, mostly because of the key-shaped border around the photos. James Harden is having an MVP-contending season for the Rockets, and hopefully this year the team will advance past the first round of the playoffs. I'd probably start an Anthony Davis PC since I also have a unibrow, but I don't even keep up with the basketball PCs I already have. A new one would just be silly. JaVale McGee and Nate Robinson are a couple of fan favorite type players.

Chandler Parsons was on his way to becoming my favorite 'new' Rocket, but I didn't like the way he handled himself during and after his move to the Dallas Mavericks. Jeremy Lin has struggled as a Laker, and I wonder if Linsanity will be on the move again soon? David Robinson and Grant Hill are two of the players I collected a bit during my initial card collecting phase in the 90's, although Robinson was a rival to my favorite player, Hakeem Olajuwon.

This Matching Numbers insert takes a couple of players who wear the same jersey number and puts them on a card together. I guess it's a cool concept, but not a must-collect set for me. I'm not a huge fan of anyone in this group, either, so that's probably a factor in my lukewarm response to it.

These Spirit of the Game inserts fill the 'insert with photos taken from the vicinity of the backboard' niche. It's an all right insert, but I don't like how far the logo intrudes into the action photo. It takes up like a third of the card.

There's not much to say about these Knight parallels. They have the different logo down at the bottom and that's pretty much it. I've heard of Shved, but the other guys I am not that familiar with.

This batch is a little better, with Kyrie Irving as a pretty big star and Morris and Evans at least being guys whose names I know.

Here is the insert that fills the 'famous old guys' slot in the set, Heroes of the Hall. There are some big names here, but no one I have much attachment to. Moses Malone is pretty cool. Patrick Ewing is a villain.

And here is the star player insert, All-Panini. Zach Randolph and Dion Waiters aren't the biggest names out there. I guess I don't follow the NBA close enough anymore to know where they fall in the star/semi-star/scrub hierarchy, but they aren't in the core group of star veterans and they aren't the hot new rookies on the scene, so they must be in the middle somewhere.

It is really hard to tell from the front, but that Zach Randolph card is a parallel. It's a Christmas Card, too, carrying the # 12 / 25 serial number.

My two promised autographs are both redemptions for Rookie Signatures. One features Quincy Miller and the other is Kahwi Leonard. Miller has spent this season signing 10-day contracts and bouncing between the D-League and the end of the Kings' and Pistons' benches, not getting a lot of playing time. I imagine he'll probably be out of the NBA altogether pretty soon. Kawhi Leonard is the young star of the Spurs, the most boring great team in the Association. He was the NBA Finals MVP last season as the Spurs won the Championship, and he plays pretty good defense while scoring some points and getting some assists on offense. If he did similar things on a flashier team this would probably be a better pull, but even as it is this card will probably cover the cost of the box once it's redeemed.

And that's it for this box. I kind of like the base set, and maybe if I get around to sorting through the cards I will consider putting it together. The boxes are cheap, which makes sense considering what you get out of one. I am not too big on any of the insert sets. Mostly it's a good cheap break if you want to bust some basketball cards and take a flier on getting a decent autograph. But honestly, I opened a box of 2014-15 Donruss Basketball recently that I think was a lot more fun than this stuff. It's still a pretty low-end break, but there was so much more going on that it felt like I got more for my dollar. I'll post that whenever I get my scans all sorted out, so probably around the time 2015-16 Donruss releases.

Breaking it Down 20: Cards from Cards on Cards

Cards on Cards recently held a box break featuring one box of 2014 Topps Mini Baseball. Unfortunately, the break faced some difficulties as he was the victim of some holiday mail theft and lost the original box for the break as well as some of the trade packages used as payment for the break. My outbound package was one of the ones that disappeared before arriving at his home. It contained a full Cardinals team set of Gold parallels from 2014 Archives, which I had acquired in my quest to complete the full Gold set. He was able to acquire another box for the break, and I finally got around to building a return package for him, which should be arriving at his new secret address in the next couple of days.

My team for the break was the Toronto Blue Jays, and I came away with one of the rarer hits in the set, a Black parallel of Moises Sierra. These cards are limited to 5 copies each, with this one being numbered # 5 / 5. Sierra spent a couple of years with the Blue Jays, but was selected off waivers by the White Sox in May 2014 and then selected off waivers from them by the Royals after the season was over. That's all I know about him. I also got a stack of base Blue Jays, which look like their counterparts in the eponymous Topps base set, only smaller.

Also included in the package were a number of cards featuring my favorite NBA team, the Houston Rockets. I believe this was part of his Guilt-Free Basketball Card Club, which is something we'd corresponded about but a trade had never actually occurred. I sent a few Clyde Drexler cards his way in my recent package, and I have more to send once I compare the rest of my collection to his Zistle list. I believe these two Hakeem Olajuwon cards were new additions to my Dream PC.

Yao Ming was set up to be a superstar for the Rockets, but nagging injuries prevented him from ever really getting things going. I don't have many cards from this era, as I got out of card collecting right around the time Hakeem went to the Raptors and then retired. It's a shame that the Ming/McGrady-era Rockets never lived up to their potential. 

That Craig Ehlo card makes me laugh. Shane Battier was Daryl Morey's poster child for whatever the basketball name for sabermetrics is. Then Battier went off to the Heat and got himself a couple of Championship rings. I included the other cards in these scans because I liked the designs or the pictures on them.

Here are a few Tracy McGrady cards I selected to scan from the stacks. McGrady is working on a new business idea, recently spent some time playing independent league baseball (he retired after the league's all-star game), and still thinks he has what it takes to make an NBA comeback.

Alongside a few more Ming highlights I've got some Rockets from the more recent iterations of the team. Chandler Parsons was briefly my favorite Rocket, but he followed the money and went to play for Dallas. That in itself isn't all that bad, but he keeps Tweeting and making references to how well he gets along with Mark Cuban, the Mavericks' owner. Maybe Mark Cuban runs his ship that way, but I don't like the idea of the players getting all comfy with the team owner. James Harden and his beard are pretty famous, but he and Dwight Howard came off as pretty arrogant during the team's offseason last year. I wonder if that attitude pushed away potential additions that could have helped the team. The current version of the team is pretty darn good, but they get beaten consistently by other good teams and I don't see them going far in the playoffs unless they get hot at the right moment.

It took me a while to get this post scanned and written up, but I really appreciated this package, especially with all the stress and confusion that Cards on Cards went through to get this group break done.

Workin' at the Card Shop 4: Duane's SportsCards Part 2

I had a little bit of free time and went back to Duane's SportsCards for a relatively long dig through the boxes there. I hit one player collection pretty hard, but I also picked up some other stuff.

The first card I grabbed for my stack was the Shannon Sharpe Stadium Club Triumvirate card on the right of that picture. It is die-cut on several sides as well as having various patterns cut out of all the circuitry in the background. I just had to have it. I also picked up one Derek Holland card. I wanted to grab a bunch more stuff of his, but they didn't have any of his cards. Well, they had about 55 of the same Bowman card and a couple of faded autographs but they were overpriced and I gave up on chasing his stuff. There was a small stack of Peyton Manning stuff, but the only card that really stood out to me was that shiny Topps Finest Gems card in the center of the scan. It's shiny.

The player collection I really hit hard on this trip was Randy Johnson. I have been a little frustrated over picking the wrong team in the Nachos Grande group break for pulling Randy Johnson cards (although I shouldn't complain as I've come away with some decent Mariners cards), so I thought I'd go after some singles to ease the pain. In the first row are some 1989 cards, Rookie Cards if my memory serves me correctly. On the bottom row are cards that stood out to me for various reasons. That Pinnacle card features a giant camera, the Ovation card has texture all over, especially the laces on the baseball pattern which are raised, and that other card is I believe a Studio card featuring Randy holding some broken bats. I'd go look at the card and verify the set, but it's like three steps away in a box and I'd have to get up out of this warm bed.

It was like 18 degrees in Arlington, Texas today, which is ridiculous. It has no right to be that cold here when I came all the way from Idaho in February/March specifically to get away from winter.

Here are a few more cards I grabbed because they stood out from the rest in some way. That Ionix card is pretty shiny, if I recall correctly. I don't remember why I selected that Topps card in the middle of the top row. There was a reason, though. The Estrellas card on the top right I got because it's all in Spanish and also shiny. I got the SP cards because they are die-cut and I remember the various SP cards being awesome back when I was a lad collecting NBA cards. Also, the little headshot on that middle card features a nice hand-shelf. For the uninitiated, a hand-shelf is a common practice in senior pictures and glamour shots in which the chin is supported on the hand, lending a thoughtful or playful air to the photo. The Metal card I selected because 1) shiny and 2) FLAME ARM!

And here is a Studio card featuring the Locker Backdrop. Randy looks pretty happy here. I think it's a trap.

And for horizontal cards we've got a Select card featuring a nice high-five as well as Johnson taking a break. That middle card has got a fuzzy attempt at 3D or something going on on the front, but features Johnson taking pictures with a camera on the back again, and the UD3 card is a Pitcher at the plate card that is a popular theme on the blogs.

I also purchased a Hobby box of 2012-13 NBA Hoops, as the dude had the cards on sale and I've been itching to build a basketball set for some time now. I haven't collated all of the cards yet, but I think I got most of the set out of the box. There isn't much as far as inserts go, but I did pull this autograph of my favorite current Houston Rockets player, Chandler Parsons. It's a sticker auto, but it is nice enough I guess. The other autograph from the box was a dude who has 36 career NBA games and no real stats to speak of. Boo! I was hoping to pull one of the Hakeem Olajuwon buyback autographs, but that was really a pipe dream. I don't even know what the odds on those are. Anyway, it was interesting to open a box that was all really basic cards and not a million colorful parallels and whiz-bangs. I don't really know how I feel about it. On the one side, it is a little refreshing. On the other hand, it feels a little like something is missing, like why would I pay normal box prices for a product that doesn't have all that stuff? I am still trying to figure out how hard I will pursue the rest of the set. I haven't yet found a site like Just Commons that sells basketball commons at decent prices.