To start things off, I want to take a look at the 1971-72 Topps Basketball set, which featured insert stickers that included team logos:
The sticker above features NBA teams, and is sticker # 46 in the set. While there is only 1 sticker for NBA logos, there are 3 different stickers featuring ABA teams, with the difference being how the team stickers are aligned on the card. Sticker #22A (The A designates ABA) is the most common version:
The other 2 ABA stickers (23A & 24A) are short prints, and much harder to find:
The sticker set also featured player stickers with 3 stickers on each card:
The NBA stickers each had a #, while the ABA stickers had a # and the letter "A":
A full sticker set consists of 26 cards as pictured below:
15 of the cards had NBA players for a total of 45 NBA stickers, which is why #46 is the set of logo stickers. 7 of the cards had ABA players for a total of 21 ABA stickers, which is why the logo stickers are numbered #22 - #24.
As for the cards, the 1971-72 Topps Basketball cards were the first Topps set to be issued in standard card size
after the "tall boy" cards of 1969-70
and 1970-71:
Topps just couldn't resist tinkering with the size of their Basketball cards as they returned with very large cards for the 1976-77 set:
and then got really small for the 1980-81 set:
Which brings us full circle back to the 1971-72 Topps Basketball stickers. Topps evidently felt 3 on 1 tri-cards worked well for basketball, given they recycled this design from the 1971-72 sticker set for the 1980-81 set.
3 comments:
FYI-Topps Canada issued a set of Trio Stickers (24 cards/72 trios)in 1972 covering the Canadian Football League. No logos though but still pretty neat. It's a little bizarre seeing FB players on them.
Man, that was an amazing trip down memory lane!
I remember being upset that those NBA stickers didn't have the right colors for some teams (see Lakers in purple & GREEN, Rockets in BLUE & gold).
My wife bought me what I thought was the complete set of Floridans cards from that year, but I didn't have that Mack Calvin one.
Daniel J Leonard
Tucson, Arizona
Man, that was an amazing trip down memory lane!
I remember being upset that those NBA stickers didn't have the right colors for some teams (see Lakers in purple & GREEN, Rockets in BLUE & gold).
My wife bought me what I thought was the complete set of Floridans cards from that year, but I didn't have that Mack Calvin one.
Daniel J Leonard
Tucson, Arizona
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