1996-97
was the first year of Upper Deck's Black Diamond product for hockey. It
was a time when short prints, inserts, and parallels were fairly new to
the hobby, and I do remember quite a lot of collectors being excited
about the chance to pull some very rare cardboard from their packs.
A specific rundown for the 180-card set is interesting, and goes like this:
Cards 1–90 are single blank diamonds
Cards 91–150 are double black diamonds (1:4 packs)
Cards 151–180 are triple black diamonds (1:30 packs)
Then there's the parallel "gold" set:
Single black diamond gold (1:15 packs)
Double black diamond gold (1:46 packs)
Triple black diamond gold (only 50 of each card available)
The biggest rookie card in this set features Joe Thornton. He's card
#160, which means it's a triple black diamond. So it's highly unlikely
that I'll find one in this pack. And with only 6 cards per pack, it's
also unlikely I'll find any insert at all. But someone's got to find
one, right? Let's find out!
Note:
The "Light FX" treatment on these cards shows up better in photographs
than it does in scans, so you'll be seeing photographs below.
Keith
Jones leads it off. He was a tough player who could also score,
especially around the time this card was released. (Career-high 25 goals
in 1996-97.) After his playing days ended, Jones was a solid TV analyst
for almost 20 years. Currently he's President of Hockey Operations for
the Philadelphia Flyers.
A
young Bill Ranford did so well in leading the Oilers to a Stanley Cup
victory in 1989-90 that he was awarded the Conn Smythe trophy at the end
of it (playoff MVP). Ranford racked up a lot of wins for the team
through the 1995-96 season. After that, he bounced around from Boston to
Washington to Tampa Bay to Detroit (and then finally back to Edmonton).
All in all, he tallied 240 wins across 15 NHL seasons.
Rem
Murray had a couple of 20-goal seasons across his 9-year NHL career,
and just missed 100 career goals by a few (94). He played mostly for
Edmonton, but also had a couple of years in the Big Apple with the
Rangers, and another couple with the Nashville Predators.
And
lastly, we've got Sergei Zubov. The talented defenseman was one of the
first Russian players to have his name inscribed on the Stanley Cup
(1993-94 New York Rangers; the other three were Sergei Nemchinov, Alexei
Kovalev, and Alexander Karpovtsev). About 5 years later, Zubov helped the
Dallas Stars to their first Cup victory. He put up great offensive
numbers throughout his career, and logged more than 1,000 total games.
He's a member of the NHL Hall of Fame.
Now
here's an example of a card back. Typical for Upper Deck at the time,
it lists only the most recent few years of stats, and uses some of the
extra room for a nice color photo. Solid write-up, too. On the negative
side, the card number is tiny. (It's in the top-left corner, if you zoom
in and look really hard.) This was also typical for Upper Deck at the
time, and it's still hard to understand why they'd do such a thing.
In
any case, that's that. For the first time on APTBNL, a pack of 1996-97
Upper Deck Black Diamond hockey cards. No superstars or multi-diamond
short prints. No gold parallels. But it was still fun to rip this pack.
Thanks for reading along.
Anyone else remember the excitement that surrounded the Black Diamond brand when it first hit the shelves back then?
