Cards, Cards, Cards, Cards!

Jose Canseco
1987 Topps

Patrick Roy
1987-88 Topps

One of my earliest card-collecting memories is playing a game at recess in elementary school that we use to call, simply, “Cards.” Basically, everyone in a group – usually it was about five kids or so, although more would be watching – would take a card from their collection and lean each against a wall in a row. Then, you’d take another half dozen or so of your own cards and tie them together with a rubber band. And then you’d toss your bundle of cards at the ones leaning against the wall. You got to keep anything you knocked over. We use to sing “cards, cards, cards, cards” (to the tune of “charge” played on a hockey arena organ), which is where I think the name game from. But Google tells me it was more commonly known as “Leaners.” Hence the name of the blog.

I was in grade 3 at the time, so my memory isn’t exactly reliable. But I do remember playing with two sets in particular: 1987-88 Topps/O-Pee-Chee hockey and 1987 Topps/O-Pee-Chee baseball. Both sets use feature simple designs that incorporate a grained wood look – the borders in the case of the baseball cards and hockey stick-shaped nameplates in the case of the hockey cards.

The 87-88 hockey, in particular, is probably my favorite set ever. So one of the first things I did after getting back into collecting was buy a full 87-88 Topps set on eBay. I initially went searching for a box to rip open, but everything I found was $200+ -- more than I wanted to pay for a nostalgia trip. The set, by contrast, set me back only $20.

Here are a few of my favorites:

The most valuable card in the set is Luc Robitaille’s rookie card. The Hall of Famer won the Calder trophy in 1987 after leading all rookies – and the Los Angeles Kings – in goals and points, with 45 and 84, respectively. Robitaille beat out Philadelphia Flyers goalie Ron Hextall (who won the Vezina trophy that season) and teammate Jimmy Carson  (who finished second in rookie scoring) for the Calder. Robitaille would go on to play 19 seasons and finish as the highest-scoring left wing of all-time, with 1,394 points. Though he played most of career with the Kings, he won his only Stanley Cup as a player with the Detroit Red Wings in 2001-02, as part of an absurdly stacked team that featured 10 current or future Hall of Famers (Robitaille, Steve Yzerman, Nicklas Lidstrom, Sergei Fedorov, Brendan Shanahan, Brett Hull, Igor Larionov, Chris Chelios, Dominik Hasek and Pavel Datsyuk).

I believe this and the second-year Patrick Roy, which is pictured at the top of the post, are the second-most valuable cards in the set. Gretzky once again lead the NHL in scoring in the 86-87 season, though he finished with *just* 183 points – the first time in four seasons that he’d scored fewer than 200 points. What a bum. No wonder Pocklington traded him the next year.

As much as I love this set, the photos are pretty unbelievably boring. The vast majority feature players skating around aimlessly in warm ups or, even more excitingly, standing around. This bench shot of the Tanti is easily the nicest picture in the set. Even today, with much higher-quality photos, shots looking down the bench like this still stand out.

Runner-up for best photo in the set. I would love to know what prompted this look on Bernie’s face.

My scanner doesn't like white borders

One of the aforementioned shots of a player standing around. Still, the vivid blue of the old Nordiques jerseys make this a pretty cool card. It’s also the one that Topps promoted on the front of its display boxes. Goulet led the Nordiques in scoring in 86-87 (49-47-96) and the 1^st Team All-Star left wing.

This is one of a handful of cards from the set that I actually remember having as a kid (I was still too young to have money to be busting many packs on my own). Me and my friends use to think it was so cool how much black tape Dineen used on his stick. One friend even claimed it helped to hide the puck from goaltenders. I immediately started using entire rolls of black tape on my own hockey stick – which I used playing road hockey, with a bright green tennis ball.

One of the nice things about this set is that it doesn’t include one of the decade’s major rookie cards (ie: Gretzky, Lemieux, Roy), which makes it much more affordable to buy. But it does include an astoundingly deep lineup of rookies, including Oates, another Hall of Famer. It’s also neat to see Ranford in a Bruins uniform, since he would later be traded to the Oilers where he’d win a Stanley Cup – beating the Bruins in the finals. Esa Tikanen was Claude Lemieux before it was cool. And you’ll be reading a lot more about Hextall on this blog in the future – he was my original favorite player and remains probably my second-favorite, behind Yzerman.

More standing shots of players standing around, although here we get one of the most under-appreciated stars of all time and a horror movie-worthy goalie mask, both in awesome old Hartford Whalers jerseys. Although I pulled these two cards out to highlight something I learned from the back of their cards: Ron Francis and Mike Liut are apparently cousins. What?

Speaking of card backs, most of the short blurbs in this set focus on some sort of stat from the 1986-87 season. These guys got two of the more interesting tidbits: Brooke was a “B+ student” at Yale and Chevrier’s nickname was “Model Chevy.”

And we end with the Yzerman card, yet another standing-around-doing-nothing-shot. It’s actually almost identical to the Oates card. Yzerman led the Red Wings in points (31-59-90) in 86-87, his fourth in the league. He would really break out the next year, beginning a run of six consecutive seasons with 100 or more points.