1996-97 Upper Deck Black Diamond Hockey

 

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. 

 

 

 

Mike Richter will be forever popular among Rangers fans for helping the team to its memorable Stanley Cup victory in 1994. He squeaked past the 300-win mark for his career (301), which was spent entirely with the Rangers. His hockey mask featuring the Statue of Liberty was pretty iconic, too. 

 

 

 

Denis Savard was a speedy, shifty skater who was famous for the "spin-o-rama" move. The Hall-of-Famer and 1992-93 Stanley Cup winner (with Montreal) was at the very end of his career by the time this card was printed, but it's still a nice one. 

 

 

 

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 help 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?