Description

By the time Fleer put Julius Erving on card #31 of its 1986-87 set, Dr. J was in the twilight of one of professional basketball's most influential careers. This was not a rookie card — Erving had already spent five seasons tearing up the ABA and nine more with the 76ers by the time this issue hit wax packs, and the 1985-86 campaign pictured on the card was his penultimate season before retirement. Erving's path to this point ran through two leagues. He turned pro in 1971 with the Virginia Squires before becoming the face of the ABA with the New York Nets, where he established himself as the league's premier player, winning two championships with the New York Nets before the ABA-NBA merger in 1976. He became the only player voted MVP in both the ABA and NBA, and his legend was cemented by an acrobatic free-throw-line slam at the 1976 ABA Dunk Contest that is still referenced as one of the signature moments in the sport's history. When the leagues merged, he brought that same game to Philadelphia and helped deliver the franchise's third championship in 1983, part of a Sixers team that went a dominant 65-17 before sweeping the defending-champion Lakers in the Finals. At age 35 in 1985-86, Erving was no longer the explosive first option he'd been in his MVP season, but he was still a full-time starter and a difference-maker in close games. He appeared in all 74 games for Philadelphia that year, and the season is remembered as much for two clutch moments as for his per-game numbers — he sank two game-winning shots at the horn during the final stretch of the 1985-86 regular season, one in Dallas in late February and another against Larry Bird's Celtics at the Spectrum in early April. It was a fitting coda for a player whose entire NBA tenure had been defined by moments that outlasted the box score, even as his role shifted and age caught up with his body — the following season would be his last, ending with a league-wide farewell tour before he announced his retirement. The career that this card commemorates adds up to one of the richest resumes in basketball history. Across the ABA and NBA combined, Erving won three championships and four Most Valuable Player awards, and he finished with 30,026 points (NBA and ABA combined), a mark that ranked him among the very highest scorers in the sport's history at the time of his retirement. He was elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1993 and later named to the NBA's 50th Anniversary and 75th Anniversary All-Time Teams, recognition of a player who helped legitimize an entire league before becoming a champion in the other. This card comes from a set that matters in its own right. The 1986-87 Fleer series was only the second basketball set in the card company's history, following a 25-year absence from the category, and it is remembered today as a landmark release — there are no less than 25 Hall of Fame players in the base set and also a dozen rookie cards of Hall of Famers, most famously Michael Jordan's. Erving's card sits among that company, a veteran star's issue inside the set that relaunched basketball cards as a mainstream hobby category.