Hoops Hobby

I didn’t attend the National. In fact, I’ve only attended local card shows over the last couple years. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t have a successful week adding to my collection, finding some cards that don’t pop up too often. These Duncan parallels span multiple eras of cards, are from some of my favorite sets, and are all numbered to 199 or less.

2009-10 is an interesting years in cards, with the special last year of Topps along with the introduction of Panini sets. My favorite of these might just be Studio. The Skylines insert set, and in particular the Proof parallel out of 199, isn’t just one of my favorite inserts of that year, it would rank pretty high on an all-time list for me.

The shine on these is great, the subtle Skylines text blends into the city background and definitely doesn’t take over the focus of the card.

I had the regular Skylines parallel of Duncan, and a trio of Skylines Danny Granger cards (regular, proof /199, and Skylines Signatures /99). Glad to have another card from my favorite insert set of 2009-10.

2002-03 is also one of my preferred years to collect. 2002-03 Fleer Hot Shots has an interesting base set, with dual-sided ‘Give and Go’ cards, and All-Star cards that look insert-ish but are a part of the base set. These ‘Hot Hands’ parallels aren’t the easiest to track down. Any serial numbered parallel from the early 2000s seems to be that way. When I saw this one listed, I had to snag it. The auction had 2 bids and luckily they were both me.

The difference between the base card and the parallel is just grey font for the base versus the bronze/brown text on the parallel, and the back has the text ‘Hot Hands’ in the bottom right, along with the serial numbering. Sharp design, parallel of one of my top players, it’s a great pickup.

Sticking with 2002-03, I grabbed another Duncan parallel from another ‘one and done’ product, 2002-03 Hoops Stars. Similar to the Hot Hands parallel from the Hot Shot product, Hoops stars has a ‘Five-Star’ parallel, bronze looking as well as compared to the silver base set, numbered out of 299.

The Hoops Stars product also had 1 Superstar Pack per box, which contained a pack of cards of all the same player, with 25 possible players. The pack has multiple inserts, a red Superstars parallel of the base set, as well as a memorabilia card or low serial numbered parallel. In a box I opened back at that time, my Superstar Pack was Jason Kidd.

For the players that didn’t have memorabilia cards (6), they instead had a parallel card numbered to 100. Duncan was one of those 6 and this is my next Duncan addition this week.

Note the Superstars text under the stats on the back of the card, and the numbering out of 100. As I’ve said many times, miss the days when photos were common on the backs of cards, even when it’s part of the same image on the front. Makes the back of the card so much better.

It’s hard to tell from the scan, but there’s a shine to these Century Proof Silver parallels out of 199, from 2010-11 Panini Threads.

Back in the Panini era, the Threads brand never stood out to me much. My favorite aspect of the 2010-11 product is the jersey and autograph cards using the design of the base cards, essentially parallels of the base set. The Triple Threats insert set is fun too, but none of my personal collection players in it that set.

I wanted to include the word ‘Platinum’ in this blog post title, but I didn’t want to give any false impressions that I’d somehow secured a Platinum Medallion Duncan, because those are well outside my reach. But this is a Platinum parallel, of the 2010-11 Playoff Contenders variety.

When I opened a hobby box of this product back in 2011, the die-cut parallels stood out as some of the more memorable cards, but the only base set parallels I opened were out of 299. That’s why when I found a black die-cut parallel out of 49, for $0.99 plus shipping, it was definitely worth grabbing.

It’s been awhile between Tim Duncan pickups, but I’m thrilled to add these parallels from many sets I appreciate to my stack of Duncan cards to enjoy.