Stamps of Approval

Before I begin, there are no trading cards in this post. Instead, I'm going to touch on one of my other hobbies, stamp collecting. I have been a stamp collector since, well...I don't know when, but based on the items in my collection I'm going to guess around 1991. My stamp collection though is the one I neglect the most. The majority of it has been acquired by cutting them off envelopes we get in the mail. I almost always have a fan on, usually a high powered fan, so working on the collection is challenging. Even in the winter, I have a fan on. My room gets the morning and afternoon sun so it can be 20 degrees out and my room is still 82 degrees in. Now that I have an air conditioner, and have now for many years, it affords me the ability to work on my stamp collection during the summer. When I finish scanning my card collection in a few years scanning my stamp collection is next up.

A few days ago a friend of my brother contacted him because she had a stamp that referenced our ancestral home town in Italy, and asked if he knew anyone who was interested in some world stamps. Of course, he knew me, so I got a big boost to my world stamp collection!

I have not finished labeling them yet, and some of them I need to research more, but I scanned some highlights.

The largest selection was from Italy...

but also represented were Canada...

Cyprus

El Salvador

England

Haiti

Luxembourg

Mexico

and Portugal

All in all, it was probably the largest day of new additions to my world stamp collection ever! I have not counted them yet, but more than 300 new stamps is not outside the realm of possibility.

Finally, here is the stamp that may reference our ancestral home town, Popoli.

 I don't know if it really does or not. Google Translate turns it into

General States of the Common Local Authorities for the people of Europe

which seems to imply that in this instance it refers not to the town but to the Italian spelling of people. I know Big Ben is not in Popoli either.  It might be a stamp about something totally different, but it did me a huge good deed by giving my collection a big boost.

If anyone would like to see more of my stamp collection, I could very easily work some more in...I have been debating making a stamp specific blog but I really don't know enough to feel like I was correct in what I was writing, for the most part. I will probably make one anyway when I get into scanning my entire collection, to use as a scan backup if nothing else, but that's several years in the future. 

Thanks for reading!

How to read the back of an NBA Basketball Card

Sports love statistics. Sports fans loves statistics....but unless you have been in the game a long time, you may not know what each statistic means or how to read the back of a card. I'm going to change that for the NBA and NASCAR, I don't have enough knowledge to do that for other sports.

 G is Games Played. If you get onto the court at any time during the game it counts as one. Each NBA season is 82 games long.
Average Minutes a game is a rarer stat to see on cards and is the average time spent on the floor. Mitch Richmond was the best player on the team and spent a lot of time on the court. Each game is 48 minutes with the possibility of a 5 minute overtime, overtimes are unlimited which means as many will be played as needed to not result in a tie.
Field Goals made and Attempted means how many shots he scored on and how many he tried to.
3 Point Made and attempted is for shots beyond the arc. The NBA introduced the 3 point line in 1979, the ABA had it as well. It continues to increase in importance as time moves along.
FT means Free Throw and that is the shots taken by a player after a foul. They count for one point.
Offensive Rebounds is how many times you grabbed the ball when you or your teammates missed a shot, Defensive Rebounds is when your opponent missed a shot. These stats are usually combined into simply "Rebounds"
AST stands for Assist, which is when you pass to a teammate that immediately leads to a scoring basket. Assists are not counted for missed baskets and only one player per play can get an assist.
STL stands for Steal, which is when you take the ball away from the opposing team. It does not count if the opponent looses control of the ball out of bounds, that's a turnover but those never appear on cards. (balls lost to steals also count as turnovers)
BLK is Block, which is when you stop the ball from scoring while it's on an upward arc. Blocks are the hardest major statistic to accumulate and they can also be quite spectacular. There are some players who have built careers almost solely on their ability to block shots.
PTS is Points, which is the major statistical category in the NBA. Points can be accumulated in 1, 2 and 3 as noted above, and the better you are at scoring points the more likely you will stick and be a star in the NBA. Mich Richmond eventually became the 12th all-time leading scorer in NBA history.
AVG is average points per game, which is what the NBA uses to determine the leading scorer, which is a shame, because the person who actually scores the most points is not always considered the league leader. Some sets will use averages for Rebounds, Assists, Steals and Blocks as well, which I personally hate. Averages mean nothing, actual totals are what's important.

Upper Deck added the HI stat, which is the highest single game points total of a player's season or career. I really like this stat and it's one of the things I miss the most that Panini doesn't include. The record is 100 points in a single game, set by Wilt Chamberlain in 1962. The highest game I've seen was Devin Booker's 70 earlier this season, a marker that has been reached only 6 times in NBA history. Reaching 40 in a single game is a major accomplishment, many players don't do that. Put up 20 on a regular basis and you are considered a star, put up 30 on a regular basis and you are considered a superstar. As you can see, UD chose to use percentages for field goals and free throw percentage, and didn't bother to include 3s at all (although Elton rarely attempted them anyway)

Panini gives VERY limited statistics and uses an odd combination of averages and real stats.

Not shown on any of these cards, but appearing rarely, is GS, which means Games Started. The 5 players who start each game are generally considered the best players on the team, and being named a starter is a career accomplishment. With 450 players in the NBA, only 150 can be starters.

I think that covers all the stats that appear on cards. though the NBA does keep other stats. Turnovers, how many times you were blocked, how many times you had the ball stolen, all are recorded by the league, but none of those stats have ever appeared on a card or are likely to.

Thanks for reading, and if I missed any, please feel free to point it out in the comments.

May 2017 Trade Recap

It wasn't as many trades as April, but I still pulled off a couple.

First came from Trading Card Database member GoSkins16-0, and was broken up into 2 parts- cards from 2012-13 and a big batch of 1994-95 Flair. 39 cards worth of the latter set!

The two main highlights with this Pat Durham card above, and the only card Chris Childs got in his rookie season, which you have already seen on Nothing but Nets. Durham is one of those rare players, he got only two NBA cards, in 1994-95 Fleer and this card, I now have both!

There were even a couple of the USA Basketball subset, which were short printed to a degree.

Here's another base card, just because I felt like scanning it. You know I favor pinstripe jerseys.

From 2012-13, a season I consider important as it was the season I got back into the NBA- and the last season before Panini started to ditch real cards and just go super high end.
I got a bunch of 2012-13 Panini, my second favorite set of the season, which brings me to one card short, Anthony Davis's rookie card.

I got the last veteran card I needed for Prestige. This set is important as my first cards in my collection of Steph Curry and Kevin Durant came from this set, two of my five favorite players in the NBA today. Lots of other players, too, but those are the big ones. All I have left to chase now are short printed Rookies and second year players that Panini decided to call rookies.

I also got two cards from Past & Present but I didn't get them scanned in time.
Most of what I got, though, were Rookies and 2nd year but labeled as Rookie cards from Panini Marquee. 35 of them to be exact, and one of the retired players included in the set to boot. That year they issued the RC and not really but called RC anyway cards in 5 different styles, in various stages of rareness. (The rarest, of which came one per box and none in this trade, was leather)
Here's an example of each that came in the trade.

 Legend

 Swirlorama (my favorite style)

 Black

 Die Cut

PETG

As you can see from the cards shown, there is some star power present too. Damian Lillard won Rookie of the Year that year, and Isaiah Thomas, the 60th and final pick of the 2011 draft, has since become a superstar with the Celtics. I got TWO of his!

With the PETG plastic cards, they are printed on white plastic card stock but the Rookie word is clear. Very hard to pull a good scan off of.

What's unusual about the Marquee set is that each class of RC or not quite but still called RC are part of the base set, making it the largest set Panini has ever produced for the NBA. The Biyombo card shown here is card #500, for example. The set is 540 cards long, but only has 100 true base cards, unfortunately. Instead of this wasted space on giving multiple cards to people, they should have given all 450 players in the league a card instead.

I got another PWE from Sean Norris, including more Marvel cards and some cards from the Superman III movie set. I know it's a terrible movie, but if I don't have to pay for the cards, I will take them! Although not my first cards from the set, it is the first I've scanned.

 Most of what I got was from Punisher War Journal, but also one card from 1994 Marvel Masterpieces.

 And here's the scan from Superman III.

These are all in really good condition, despite the black borders on front and the red on the back. No chipping on any of the 4 cards I got. Rarity for a 34 year old card.