1 Player, 1 Card, 3 Teams

Editor's note: I'm too busy working on models to actually write posts at this time. I only have a short window I can build in before it gets too hot and humid, so when the weather is good it takes up all my attention. This post was written a few months ago and held in queue. I completed my first model of 2019 on Monday, so I am accomplishing something!

It's not uncommon to have cards of a player listed with one team but shown with another. Players get traded or sign with new teams all the time.

But three teams on one card? That's rarer, but not unheard of. I've been wanting to write about that topic for a while, but never got to it. Now, I scanned a card that shows it so I figure it's a perfect time.

B.J. Armstrong played the 1994-95 season with the Chicago Bulls, in fact he had played his entire 6 year career to that point with the Bulls, winning three NBA titles in the process. However, the NBA added two new teams for the 1995-96 season, and he went to the Toronto Raptors as one of their expansion picks.

The earlier 1995-96 releases list him as a member of the Raptors. However, he would never play a game for the club. He refused to, in fact, despite being their first pick. With no other options available, the Raptors had to make a trade.

Three months after the draft- and around one month before the season began- he was traded by the Raptors to the Golden State Warriors for FIVE players. A 1-for-5 deal is quite rare in and of itself. The trade was made too late for some of the cards to mention it at all, while several added Traded To demarcation, as this Metal card did, and some others. (of the five players he was traded for, only 2- Carlos Rogers and Victor Alexander - ever got an NBA card, all 5 played in the NBA)

Back in those days, most sets had a Series II so he soon began showing up in Warriors uniform.

After a year+ in Oakland, he was again traded for more than one player- this time to the Charlotte Hornets, who sent both their point guards to Golden State for him.

It's interesting to ponder what could have happened if he was not traded by the Raptors. He surely would have been their starting point guard in their first season, but instead that went to Damon Stoudamire, who would go on to win Rookie of the Year that season, my first as a fan of the sport. More than likely Stoudamire would not have gotten anywhere near the playing time to be Rookie of the Year if he was on the bench behind a capable and durable point guard. B.J. Armstrong was a starting point guard on the Championship Bulls, after all, and played all 82 games in the 1995-96 season. I was unable to find the final voting for Rookie of the Year for the season, so I'm not sure who was runner up. I think it may have been Antonio McDyess, but I'm not sure where to even look. Whether it was McDyess, Joe Smith, Michael Finley or anybody else, it would not have affected their careers, other than the bonus money that comes from being named one of the major award winners. Had the trade not happened, though, who's to say how Stoudamire would have fared in his career?

Armstrong is one of the few players who has gone on to be an agent after his playing career.

Just a fun little bit of NBA trivia.

Error Gallery: Mis-aligned effects

It would have made perfect sense to post an Error Gallery post on April Fool's Day, but it didn't occur to me in time...

There are lots of special things done to cards to make them special. Sometimes, though, it goes wrong.

2003 Press Pass Top Shelf #TS2

The only card I've ever seen where the embossing is off center and the image is not!

1995 Classic #45

 I wasn't quite sure where to put this one- the silver is not properly lined up with the white underlay. Could have easily gone in Print Error as well.

1995-96 Metal #136

1995-96 Metal #173

1995-96 Metal #191

All three cards from 1995-96 Metal Series 2 are missing the "metalizing" effect at the very top of the card, most clearly visible on the basketball. I also have a Danny Ferry with the same issue but it's nearly impossible to see in the scan so I didn't post it.

I have a couple of cards from 1996 SP NASCAR that the scans are really awful on and need to be rescanned, and the annoying this is that I had them in my hand in the month of March and forgot they needed to be rescanned, and put them back in the box...which is a pain in the butt to get in to, but...the scan doesn't show up anyway. The error is that the hologram background has a layer added over it where the picture was, and I have two cards that it was not lined up accurately, and you can see a hologram silhouette around the person's picture.  You can kind-of-sort-of see it on this Rusty Wallace card, he's not supposed to have that glow around his head.

Now, by sharing this scan, you can see why I've been debating trying to fix or just outright re-scan a large portion of my NASCAR collection. (I've mentioned that mental debate several times over the course of Cardboard History). There's a lot of crappy work that I accepted as "good enough" for some reason, when I scanned my entire collection in 2009 and 2010. This is totally unacceptable yet I accepted it. I have no idea what I was thinking, proving that not only card companies make errors. Also, I somehow messed up the creation of this post so you are getting think funky layout. I tried to fix it several times and was unsuccessful.

Anthony Mason has passed away

2015 is turning out to be a horrible year. I've already lost two family members, and the NBA family has lost a half dozen in February alone. NASCAR lost Thee Dixon recently as well.

I just saw when I got on my computer that Anthony Mason passed away overnight, at the age of 48, due to congestive heart failure.

This is a shock to me. I didn't think it sounded good when he had a series of heart attacks recently, but last reports were that he was improving.

I have a LOT of memories of him playing, and while I only got to see him with the Knicks for 3 months in 1996, that is the team I most associate with him. When I first discovered the NBA in April 1996 I watched more Knicks games than anyone else, and he was one of the starting forwards for most if not all of those games.
He also played for the Charlotte Hornets, Miami Heat and Milwaukee Bucks during the years I was watching the NBA.

But to me those 1995-96 Knicks are a special team in my memory, and he is the first to pass away.

This is my favorite Knicks card of him in my collection, 1995-96 Metal #72

The card looks a lot better than it scans.

He also appears on both a relic and autograph in my collection.

The relic is a jersey card from one of the 2001-02 High Topps' insert sets, the inappropriately named "Giant Remains" set.

 

His autograph appears in my collection from the 2011-12 Past & Present set. I won a lot of 6 autographs on Ebay that included his and fellow Knicks forward Charles Oakley. 

I really am saddened by this news. Rest in peace, sir.