Every so often, you want to open a pack of cards but there's absolutely nothing to be found. This happened to me this weekend. I pulled into the Quik Trip to fill up after having a crappy day. I was hoping to snag a pack of cards, but QT has been very hit and miss the past year. Some of them have an entire rack full of the newest cards, others a lone box of old Topps amid some dusty gaming cards. The QT I pulled into was apparently Hockey Central for the state of Georgia. Just about every hockey set from last year was there save Beehive and Upper Deck Ultimate. Not interested in hockey, I found some Topps series two blister packs which I passed on since I've almost finished the set, and a few basketball packs. One of the basketball packs they had was Turkey Red, which I had been avoiding. I like the baseball set, and the football set was ok, but basketball didn't do anything for me. The big turn off was that Topps dropped the number of cards per pack from 8 to 6 for some reason. Way to add value, Topps. The pack busting bug bit me though, and I figured that Larry Legend wouldn't let me down this one time. Besides, if the pack sucked, I could bitch about it here.
214 Renaldo Balkman RC
200 Adam Morrison RC
171 Mike James
109 Rafer Alston Red Parallel
235 Bill Russell
227 George Gervin
You know what, this pack wasn't half bad. Two rookies I had actually heard of, two legends and, well, not much else. Still, a 66% success rate is pretty good considering I haven't seriously followed the NBA since Mookie Blaylock was in a Hawks uni. Isiah Thomas caught a lot of shit for drafting Renaldo, but he looks like a pretty good bench player. The 'Stache didn't light it up his rookie year, but didn't really suck either. Rookies are nice, but I love the Old School players. Bill Russell is just plain awesome, although the card would be much cooler if he was posting up Wilt. My favorite though is the Ice Man, George Gervin in the sweet ABA Virginia Squires uniform with the WAAAY too short shorts.
I'll have to admit, I really like these cards. The schoolyard motif they used for all the backgrounds is actually pretty cool and is done much better than in that bizarre Topps Matrix set from a few years ago. That being said, this is probably the last pack of this I buy unless it turns up in a dollar box somewhere. I probably got damn lucky with this pack and I don't need to be wasting my money on this stuff when there's Goudey to buy. Still, it's worth snagging a few good commons from this set.
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