Major, Major Milestone

 I knew it was coming but I didn't know when it would be. It was a long journey to get to this point, starting all the way back in February 1996. I knew I would hit it when I got my mail on November 8th, 2024, but I couldn't do it right away....the milestone? 100,000 unique NBA cards! 

Although NBA doesn't play as large a role in my life as it once did, it's still a big part. I'm still very actively collecting the NBA and I really wanted to get some of the Haunted Hoops set Panini made for this Halloween. I've been very critical of Panini over the years, but they did a great job with this. The cards are cheap, bright and fun, everything cards should be! I had to resort to Ebay to get my hands on a "box", which is actually just a really big pack with 40 more packs inside. They arrived to me on November 8th, but I had to scan them large pack before I could open the regular packs- and I had stuff on my scanner while I finished my monthly upload. I finally finished that on the 9th, and then scanned and opened the cards and entered them into my Excel collection chart, where I determined which card was #100,000. It turned out to be #40, Jusuf Nurkic. Of the 100,000 NBA cards I have, it is the 23rd of Nurkic. 

There were a LOT of new people to my collection in this box. NBA cards have gotten very hard to get locally, and almost all the players that have entered the league since 2020? About 60% of them were not yet present in my collection. This one box went a big way towards fixing that. Considering one of my main collecting projects ever is getting at least one card of every NBA player to get one, it was a big boost. This set also has photography from after the trade deadline of the 2023-24 season, so all of the players who got traded at the deadline or changed teams before the 2023-24 season appear with their new teams for the first time in my collection here too. I don't know how many people joined my collection for the first time yet, but I will soon, since I've pulled out all the new people to scan first. That will be revealed to me in full when I do my monthly upload starting on December 1st. I estimate it's more than 30 people in only 117 cards. I have enough cards now- and so many people, closing in on 20 thousand, that I can't remember who is actually in my collection 100% anymore, especially if I only have 1 card of them and it's not scanned yet. 

It's funny...back in 1996, my Mom gave me a pack of basketball cards as a gift for Valentine's Day, knowing that in my school, where she volunteered more than 10,000 hours, a lot of kids collected cards and I did as well, but I was collecting NASCAR and Non-Sport only...everyone else was collecting NBA. She got me those cards so I could have something with my friends to trade with. Later that night, I found a game on TV- Knicks and Hornets. I was hooked, and basketball cards became the biggest deal for me for the longest time, until I burned myself out in 2006. I returned in 2012, now considering the break I took one of the bigger mistakes of my life, but I am wise enough to now know that I will never fully walk away from something I love ever again, a lesson that needed to be learned the hard way. 

Of my friends who were collecting and trading back in 5th grade, I'm still in contact with most of them, at least loosely via Facebook...not a single one stayed in the hobby. I am the only one. 

My extreme, obsessive documentation started after I hit 25,000 cards...or at least when I thought I did. I didn't have the collection totals fully proofed and accurate until I finished typing everything in to my Excel charts earlier in 2024, but I'm counting it as accurate. 

A timeline of major milestones:

• 1st NBA Card- February 14th, 1996. 1995-96 Fleer #220 Sam Cassell
• 50,000th NBA Card - April 5th, 2003. 2002-03 UD Glass #75 Hedo Turkoglu
• 75000th NBA Card- February 14th, 2014. 2012-13 Panini Brilliance #175 John Salmons
• 100000th NBA Card - November 9th, 2024. 2023-24 Haunted Hoops #40 Jusuf Nurkic

Will this be the last Major Milestone for the NBA? There's the possibility that it is. Regular milestones are every 1000 cards, the next Major Milestone will be 125000. I simply don't add as many cards as I once did, my collection is advanced enough now that adding new cards isn't as easy, but the biggest hurdle is that they simply aren't making as many cards as they used to. I can't collect what doesn't exist. I don't enjoy the Chrome cards which is what the majority of Panini's current products are, and when Topps gets the license back in a couple of years, they are no better with making everything chrome all the time. Even if I got the complete flagship Hoops and Donruss sets every year, that's only 550 cards- and I've never completed a Donruss NBA set, and I have not completed a Hoops set since 2016-17, so the odds of that happening are slim, let alone every year. I am not trying to be defeatist or anything, but I'm just realistically thinking that it may not happen. Whether it does or doesn't I don't really mind. I've built a collection that even without my personal bias of it being mine, I think I safely say without hyperbole is nothing sort of incredible, not to brag. Looking through all the NBA history I've got documented on cardboard is without a doubt more comprehensive than the Basketball Hall of Fame, and documenting history is my main reason for collecting and truly doing everything I do- photography, model building as well. Writing this blog also comes from that- thus the name, Cardboard History. 

One weird thing about the 4 Major Milestones I have documented? 3 of them were purple based teams, with two being the Kings and one being the Suns. Not a single one of them was planned, all of them were from a pack that I opened.