1974 Fleer NBA Basketball Patches

In this post, we take a look at a pack of 1974 Fleer NBA Basketball Patches. The wrapper is bright 70's blue for sure! It shows the Fleer logo with the words "real cloth" and the NBA logo. The copyright on the pack shows 1969, but we will see in a moment why that is not the actual copyright for the contents. Also on the wrapper, the name of the set along with several NBA logos. It tells us there is a stick of gum in there, too. Great.

The pack contains a stiff card that the patches rest against. This card is called "The Shots: Two-hand jumper." The back describes the shot while the front has a cartoon/line art drawing of the indicated move. This card is labeled as "4 of 21" and carries a copyright of 1974. So, the wrapper may be the same one they used in 1969, but the stuff inside (or the Shots card, anyway) is from 974.

Ah, the gum. Nothing quite like gum from somewhere between 1969 and 1974...

Finally, we get to the patches! In this pack, we have two patches of the Golden State Warriors. Fleer calls these "patches," but really, they are cloth stickers from what I can tell.

Update: Thanks to Billy Kingsley for the following additional info:

The 1969 date is when the players union authorized stuff like this. They are actually from the 74-75 season. Topps had the exclusive license for cards, but Fleer got around that by only using generic images on the cards, and putting the NBA logos on cloth.

Unfortunately the adhesive used has attacked a vast majority of them. not a single one of mine doesn't have glue melt. Each team got two stickers, one of their logo and one of their logo on a basketball.

Packs of these are pretty rare. I've never seen one in person despite being a very active NBA collector since 1996.