1971-72 Topps Basketball NBA & ABA Team Stickers

Now that Football season is over I thought I'd take a break from reviewing Football sets and spend some time taking a look at some Basketball sets which feature team logos.

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.