One Hit Wonders NBA #1 Scott Meents

As I believe I've stated in the past. I prefer to get cards of obscure players more than common superstars that are in every set. I recently posted about my project of getting at least one card of every person who has an NBA card. What if that person only ever had one card? That makes them a One Hit Wonder!

Some people, if you look them up on the Database or Beckett, will show multiple cards, but for this blog (and my collection), only NBA cards count. (I don't have that problem for NASCAR, which will also be included in OHW).

There probably won't be any players who make OHW in the Panini Era. With the massive amounts of parallels Panini has produced, and the lack of promotional issues in recent years, even players who are only included in one set usually have 4 or more cards.

The player chosen as the first One Hit Wonder, or OHW, truly has only one card issued, and they didn't even bother to spell his name correctly on the front of the card! I did not know this card, or even set, existed until I was looking around on Ebay several days ago while trying to determine what to use my Ebay Bucks on. When I saw this team issue from 1990-91, I knew I had to have it, and when I realized there was a player who was not in my collection, my anticipation only grew. It arrived in the mail yesterday and finally spurred me on to create One Hit Wonders, something I have wanted to do for quite some time - before I even had a blog, in fact.

I have to admit, I was not familiar with Scott Meents before. I didn't start watching the NBA until 1995-96, and while I have a deep appreciation for the history of the sport, many players who played before my time, if they aren't the stars that get mentioned on TV often, I only know them through cards. So, when there are players who had a very short career, and didn't get cards, or at least cards I knew about, they slip through the cracks and I don't know much, if at all, about them. He was one of them.

I had to look him up to see which name was the correct spelling.

As it turns out, they got the name wrong on the front of the card, but got it correct on the back.

He played only 39 games in his career, over two seasons with the Sonics. He only played 13 games with them in 1990-91, and this photo was taken during the fourth game, played on November 20th, 1990. He played only one minute, and put up no stats other than a personal foul. The Sonics beat the Nets 105-88, however. All of these stats come from http://www.basketball-reference.com/, an excellent website that is invaluable to stat junkies like myself. I didn't realize you could get that in-depth, even determining the exact date the photo was taken before writing this post.

Kayo, the company that produced this card, is a fairly obscure card company in itself. They never produced any mainstream card sets for the NBA, but they did do multiple promo team sets, and all that I've seen were produced in 1991, although both for the 1990-91 and 1991-92 seasons. (coincidentally, the other Kayo set represented in my collection is their Nets set). They mainly produced boxing cards, which I have none of in my collection. Production quality is high. It appears they were only in business during 1991.

You can see the rest of this 14 card team issue Here on the Trading Card Database.

As always, thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more One Hit Wonders, from both the NBA and NASCAR, in the future!