Return to 'Tender

 Ever since going to the Rhinebeck car show early in May, I've been on a 60s music kick again. (as an aside, car shows play the best music) And of course, you can't listen to a 50s/60s channel without hearing Elvis. When they play his "Return to Sender" when you are looking at the following card:

it's very easy for the song to start playing in your head but instead of "Return to Sender" it becomes "Return to 'Tender" and then the idea popped into my head to write a post about goaltenders. Other than the post title, it didn't give me much to build off of. Hmm, perhaps a countdown of the top 10 Goaltenders in my collection, based on number of cards? 

10. Technically 9th and 10th are tied, both with 48 cards. But since I don't particularly like John Vanbiesbrouck, he gets last. His numbers are bumped up because he played for my team. Sergei Bobrovsky is 3 cards away from bumping him out of the top 10, and frankly I hope it happens. He actually had been ahead of him until I got the Rangers Centennial set for Glad I'm Not Dead Day.

9. Ed Belfour is in 9th, and of the Top 10 I know the least about him. He retired before I started watching the sport. One of his cards does mention he has a classic car so he can't be too bad! 48 cards of him reside in my collection.

8. I thought the 8th place goalie would be higher, but nope...he's only in 8th with 51 cards, Martin Brodeur.

7. There's a big drop between 6th and 7th, with Connor Hellebuyck holding down 7th most goalie cards, but he only has 52 in my collection, 14 less than the 6th place goalie. He is still active and that does give him a chance to add more cards than a retired player would though. 

6. Just barely out of the top 5 is one of the all-time greats, Patrick Roy. I didn't get to see him play live but I did get to see him coach. The Islanders shouldn't have fired him. I currently have 66 cards of him.

5. Holding the final spot in the top 5 is current superstar and guaranteed Hall of Famer Andrei Vasilevskiy, with 69 cards.

4. The highest ranked goalie who I didn't get to see play live isn't a surprise, as he's one of the all-time greats of my favorite team, and our last Stanley Cup winning goalie, Mike Richter. I currently have 73 cards of him, tied with Mario Lemieux.

3. Once we got below the top 2 I wasn't exactly sure how it play out so looking at my collection totals to make this post let me be surprised as well. Carey Price is in third, with 76 cards. 

2. Coming in second isn't really a surprise either, and that's Marc-Andre Fleury, with 94 cards. Marc-Andre is my mom's all-time favorite player and I'm also a fan. 

1. Of course, at number one, and the only number I knew who it would be before I started writing this post, is Henrik Lundqvist, my all-time favorite NHL player and one of the few who I actively buy single cards of. Not only does he have the most goalie cards in my collection, he has the most hockey cards overall of all players combined, with 165 at the time of this writing. 

Since I'll be curious if I remember to revisit this post/concept into the future, here are the contenders looking to move into the top 10:

1. 11. Sergei Bobrovsky 45
2. 12. Jonathan Quick 44
3. 13. Igor Shesterkin 42
4. 14. Roberto Luongo 41
5. 15. Dominik Hasek 40
6. 16. Curtis Joseph 40
7. 17. Tuukka Rask 40
8. 18. Sean Burke 38
9. 19. Semyon Varlamov 38
10. 20. John Gibson 36
11. 21. Daren Puppa 36
12. 22. Pekka Rinne 34
13. 23. Braden Holtby 33
14. 24. Kari Lehtonen 31
15. 25. Nikolai Khabibulin 30
16. 26. Matt Murry (1) 30
17. 27. Bill Ranford 30
18. 28. Carter Hart 29
19. 29. Cory Schneider 29
20. 30. Mike Vernon 29

Since I started the post with a card of Ukko-Pekka Luukonen, he has a long way to go. I currently have 11 cards of him. 

We are the Champions!

 30 years. That's how long I've been a Knicks fan. Since I was in 5th grade. Through the ups and downs, the many, many downs, the mismanagement, even the horrors of the Phil Jackson era...I've been a Knicks fan. I never thought I would see the day the Knicks were NBA Champions. Not only for the 30 years have I been watching the sport...not for the 41 years I've been alive...but for 53 long years the Knicks were held out of the Champions list. I've seen them play in the Finals before. Most of the time I've seen them fall short. This year, though...this year was different. Not only did the Knicks win the NBA Championship, they dominated the playoffs. Largest margins of victory. Longest winning streak. Biggest comeback. All these things were accomplished this season, and finally...finally, the Knicks won it all, for the third time in their 79 attempts. One of only three original NBA teams- and one of only two to be in the same city the entire time, the Knicks became only the 9th franchise with 3 or more NBA Championships. I don't know what the future holds, back to back winners are very rare by design in this era. The salary cap already cost the Knicks three of the Championship players including key important player Mitchell Robinson, so even though I think a repeat is possible with this core, I'm not going to assume it's a given. I am going to relish every moment of this playoff series and I will rewatch it every time MSG repeats it. 

Now, documenting this on cards. That fell on Topps Now, which did an OK job. They definitely favored the Spurs, but they did make some very nice cards for my team. 

The Championship team photo is always incredible and this year does not disappoint. Although considering my team won I don't think I would be disappointed in any way, lol. 

OG's amazing shot will forever go down as one of the biggest moments in Knicks history. 

Jalen absolutely deserved the MVP. He went above and beyond what most people expected of him. 

Trading for KAT is what made this Finals run possible. That is when the team started to take shape. 

I even got to see a parade for my team! A parade in NY is always great, and in the last three years I've gotten to see one for the Liberty and the Knicks. For a basketball fan it doesn't get much better than that. 

Unfortunately Topps only made 4 cards for the parade, but I got them all, of course. 

Finally, on July 23rd my Champions team set arrived.

A 15 card insert with one parallel or autograph.  Here are all 15 cards.

My only complaint is that Mike Brown didn't get a card. This was one of the few times in the league where a coach made a positive difference in the team. 

My parallel was the SP version of Mikal Bridges.

I have to be honest, I would rather the Champions team set had been the players with the trophy rather than the action shots. They are good too, and all photos from the finals, but posing with the trophy is special. 

It's now a month later, the cards are all in hand proving this actually happened...but I still can't quite fully believe it. A small part of me still expects to wake up and have it all have been a dream. 

I had to get the shirt too. Fanatics didn't make anything good in my size, so I ended up ordering a bootleg off a Facebook ad. Gotta do what you gotta do.

New York Knicks, 2026 NBA Champions. I will never, ever get tired of hearing that, or writing it. A dream come true. 

New People May and June 2026

 When I went to compose the June new people post, I realized that I forgot to write a post for May. Oops. I can't remember if I have forgotten in the past or not, which is kind of funny in and of itself. 

I scanned 57 new people in May, a large majority of them from the AHL box my Mom gave me for Glad I'm Not Dead Day. 

New people was pretty big! Many of the people appear in both places but there are more people added than scanned. I got 475 new cards in May and scanned 695 cards

Moving to June, all numbers went down, despite the fact that I made a rare trip to Target and Walmart and bought some blasters, most of which were people I already had in my collection. May 1st- Glad I'm Not Dead Day- is treated by my family as a second birthday as it was my second chance at life after coming literally 5 minutes away from dying in 2013, and has become one of the major card receiving days of the year, with my birthday and Christmas. 

Only 27 new people were scanned in June, with every single one of them except 1 also being added in the month. (Brett Berard). 14 of the 27 were from the WNBA Draft set I bought from Panini Instant. 

New people added for June shows the color coding that I use for myself to make it find who I'm looking for easier. My four main sports get a color unique to them. I normally screencap it as soon as I finish entering them into my chart, but I made a mistake with the very first person alphabetically here, originally listing her under M. Then I looked up her Wikipedia page and realized that Akoa is part of her last name, not a middle name. WNBA again dominates the new people- most of them from the same Instant set, but I also bought a Prizm blaster for some reason- I will post about that at some point, probably. All the miscellaneous sports people came from the SI for Kids magazine which arrived on June 30th, barely making it into the month. 

I scanned 532 cards during the month- most of them in the last week as it got too hot to paint models- and I added 346 new cards during the month, more than half of them from the aforementioned trip to Target/Wal-Mart. 

The largest team upload ever!

 Being that it's the first of the month, that means it's upload day, and I knew as of May 1st that the June upload would be the largest team update ever. On May 1st, we celebrate "Glad I'm Not Dead Day", to celebrate the second chance I got at life back in 2013. And of course, when it comes time for gift giving, that means cards! And this year it was the Factory set and a tin of the New York Rangers Centennial set. 

Of course, I prioritized scanning them and I got them all scanned successfully. Those, combined with the other cards I scanned this month, saw me have 243 Rangers cards to upload this month, the largest update ever since I began my Cardboard History Gallery nearly 8 years ago. 

Here's a behind the scenes look at how I do my uploading. The computer automatically puts them in order by title of card, and I go through and upload them in order based on whatever is oldest. I tried doing it alphabetically by team but I found that wasn't much fun so switched away quickly. Then I just slide them over from one window into the team listing, and done. It's actually really quite simple, but time consuming. Doing the team update is usually my favorite part of each month, although sometimes I enjoy updating each person's album more. I have not done the people part yet, that's always the most work and I always do it last, but I am curious to see how many people from the Rangers Centennial set will be new to my collection. I'll find out soon, and share it in the New People post, whenever I finish. 

It also put my Rangers collection over 2000 cards scanned! To put that into perspective, the Boston Bruins are in second place, with 860 cards scanned. 

Kyle Busch Memorial

 Absolutely shocking news from NASCAR today. Early this morning they said Kyle Busch would be missing this weekend's race due to sickness, later in the afternoon, he had died. The entire NASCAR world is in shock. I am in shock. Kyle was 41 years old, a few months younger than me. His son just had his 11th birthday party on Monday and his daughter is only 4 years old. He was a GREAT father to those two and it's hurting most of all to think that they are not going to have their father. 

I have to admit I was not his biggest fan on track but I respected him, and there is NO question that the sport itself will miss him. He's been all over the sport in it's entirety since he was 15 years old. NASCAR even put in the age rules that are in place now to prevent him from dominating as a kid. 

He was very popular with the card manufacturers, which is not surprising considering his record and popularity. My records show that I have 410 cards of him, of which I have gotten 307 scanned. That ranks him 24th overall in my NASCAR collection. While that's too many to fit into a post I will post a selection that documents his career. 

There are hero cards from his brief time at Roush in the Truck series as a teenager, but I don't have them. 

His earliest card I do have is this one, from Racing Champions, where he got his start in Busch series driving the #87 for NEMCO Motorsports which significant backing from Hendrick Motorsports. (Joe Nemechek was with Hendrick at the time)

He ran a full season in the #5 Hendrick car in the Busch series, winning Rookie of the Year easily. 

In 2005 he moved to Cup full time replacing the semi-retired Terry Labonte in the #5 car and would find early success, winning as a rookie. 

Rookie wins are fairly unusual but he got two during the season. He would win one more race each in 2006 and 2007, including the first COT race at Bristol in 2007...

Then in 2008 he moved to Joe Gibbs Racing and would go from a rising star to one of the all-time greats in the history of the sport. 

He would stay with JGR until 2022. 

He took home the 2015 and 2019 Cup championships. 

In 2023 he moved to Richard Childress Racing, where he scored the final 3 wins of his career, 63 in total, which is 9th on the all-time list. 

He would continue to race in the Busch/Xfinity and Truck series, including winning as most recently as this past weekend, just 6 days ago...

With 102 Busch/Nationwide/Xfinity and 69 Truck series wins, he is the all time record holder in both of those divisions. 

In addition to his driving career, he also owned Kyle Busch Motorsports which gave many drivers active today their big break in the sport.

Despite only living 41 years, he competed in NASCAR for 25 years and is unquestionably in the conversation for the best who ever did it.