pretty big hockey milestone

 Although I have not had much motivation to write, I am still doing card stuff almost every day. And that stuff is mostly in the form of scanning, which as I've well documented in previous posts is one of my favorite things to do. 

Today I hit a pretty big milestone in scanning, as I've scanned my 20,000th NHL Card! 

It turned out to be this Mikael Backlund card from 2020-21 Parkhurst. 

Ever since I began collecting the NHL, which is just a month short of 8 years already, I've been storing all the NHL scans in one folder. I assumed I would have to break them up into year folders like I did for the NBA and NASCAR, but that happened on my old computer, which maxxed out at 16000 items per folder. My current computer obviously doesn't have that limitation, since after adding the November scanned cards I was at 19726 scans in the folder. I knew it was likely going to see me hit the 20000 mark during December, but then I did a big batch of NBA and Non-Sports cards after a big batch of hockey. After the last batch I was 17 scans away but I have found that planning scanning isn't as fun as random scanning so I wasn't going to force it...then I finished that box and opened up the next box to work on and what do I come across but the entirety of the 2020-21 Parkhurst cards I got in trade on the Database several years ago and hadn't scanned yet. Backlund happened to be the card that was the 20,000th. 

While this is #20000 for the NHL, this isn't #20000 for hockey.   I have 7 cards from international leagues, 450 for minor leagues, and 39 for national team only sets, which means I'm basically at 2/3rds of my entire hockey collection scanned at this point! I have 31thousand something cards in my NHL collection, although that number will probably go up at Christmas since that is my #1 card receiving day of the year, although if not, that's OK too. 

I'm starting to feel like the end is in sight on the scanning project. There's still years ahead of me but the scanned cards now outweigh the waiting to be scanned by a significant margin...I estimate that I have only about 1/4th left to scan or less. Of course I also estimated that I would finish scanning everything in 2016, so my estimating skills are poor at best, LOL. I'm actually a bit worried about what I'm going to do when I finish scanning everything. That's so much of my life now for so long, I don't know what I'll do with my time once I finish. I'll think of something, that's a problem for another day, another year...for now I got back to editing scans. 

Utah Hockey Club joins the collection, history of 1-year only NHL Teams

 It's always exciting to me when I can add a new team to the collection. Even though it's really just the Arizona Coyotes in a new place, any team name change counts as a new team, with a new album on the Cardboard History Gallery. It's not something that happens every day, much rarer than adding a new person to my collection. 

The 2024-25 Topps Now set is the first release to show images from this season, and this is card #3 in the set- my first Utah Hockey Club card. 

and card #4 is a team card, which I always enjoy and specifically search for. 

The third week brought my third Utah card, and this is my first card of Lamoureux as well, which means it will be the first card showing Utah in the Alphabetical Directory. 

Utah is playing without a name this year and will introduce the actual name of the team next season. So Utah Hockey Club will be pretty obscure in the grand scheme of things. There are only 5 previous team/name combinations that were one year only, and the most recent was the Brooklyn Americans all the way back in 1941-42! Of the six, Utah Hockey Club was the only one that is planned to be one year only. 

The others:

Brooklyn Americans, 1941-42. Formerly known as the New York Americans, the team was renamed the Brooklyn Americans for the final season, despite still playing in Manhattan, but couldn't survive the Depression and WWII. When the team folded it created the Original Six era. There had been 10 teams before the Depression.

Montreal Wanderers, 1917-18. The rarest team in NHL History, lasting only 6 games into the very first season of the league before their arena burned down, never to appear again. (The team dated back to 1903 pre-NHL)

Philadelphia Quakers, 1930-31. The team was struggling as the Pittsburgh Pirates, and moved to Philadelphia to try and salvage the team. It failed, and this was the first of 4 teams to fold as a result of the Depression.

Quebec Bulldogs, 1919-20. Moved to Hamilton and became the Tigers after one season. Playing only 24 games as the Bulldogs, the Utah Hockey Club has already played more games (25 as of this writing) than the Bulldogs did.

St. Louis Eagles, 1934-35.  Had been the original Ottawa Senators, which was a successful team in the early days of the NHL, even winning four Stanley Cups. Holds a unique place in NHL history on two fronts; it was the oldest team of the 4 that the league founded with, dating back to 1883. Secondly, while the team only played in the NHL for one season it actually continued on until 1954 in other leagues, what was known as semi-professional. That format of hockey that is not really around anymore, replaced by the AHL-ECHL format. 

All five of the defunct team logo cards come from the excellent 2004-05 In the Game Franchises set. 

While hockey cards have been produced almost continually during the NHL's existence, the early cards are rare and expensive. All of the one year teams also existed long before I was born, let alone collecting! With three Utah cards in the collection, they have already passed or tied all but one of the 5 previous one year only teams in my collection, and Brooklyn has only 4 cards so it's only a matter of time before they have the lead. The Montreal Wanderers are one of three teams that have only one card in my collection, the other two being the previous names of the Toronto Maple Leafs, the Arenas and St. Patricks. Unfortunately I was unable to find a box of the In the Game Franchises Canadian series to purchase which has the only cards of these early teams I'll likely ever be able to add to my collection. 

New People November 2024

 November was a fairly light scanning month. My desire to work on models returned so I did that for most of the month instead of scans. As such, I only scanned 414 cards. 

32 of them turned out to be new people, and as I predicted, the majority of them were indeed from the Haunted Hoops box. 

The 2024-25 Topps Now cards (stickers) also started arriving and added the first 5 new people from the current season for either the NHL or NBA, the latter of which I have not gotten any 2024-25 cards from yet and don't even know if they have been released. 

These were the people who joined my collection in November. While a lot of them appear in the scanned screenshot as well, not all do- I got myself a box of the Topps G-League set but am holding off on scanning them for now. I'm holding out for the Heystack system, which will hopefully be sometime in 2025. It's not really up to me but up to technology becoming available. Ever since the NY Fanatics Fest I've been setting aside any card with foil of any sort on it for the day when I can get my hands on one of those machines. There's still plenty of foilless cards awaiting their turn to be scanned, so even though I am really looking forward to getting those G-League cards properly documented, I'll wait.