Description

By the time this sticker hit wax packs in the fall of 1989, Michael Jordan had already answered the question that follows every brilliant young scorer: could he do it without the ball dominating everything else? In 1988-89 he did both at once, and at a level no one in the league could match. The numbers from that season are the reason this particular sticker exists in a Fleer All-Stars set. Jordan led the league in scoring averaging 32.5 points, 8.0 rebounds, 8.0 assists and 2.9 steals per game, and was named to the All-NBA First Team, and to the NBA All-Defensive First Team. That two-way dominance was not a one-year accident; a year earlier he had already won the league's MVP award for the first time, an honor he would eventually collect five times, and he was deep into a run of ten career scoring titles. By the time the 1988-89 season closed, Jordan was already a fixture on the NBA's biggest stage: he averaged 32.5 points, 8.0 rebounds and 8.0 assists in 81 games in 1988-89, and was selected to play in his fifth All-Star game. None of this came without adversity. Jordan's Bulls teams of the late 1980s kept running into the Detroit Pistons' "Bad Boys," a wall that turned back Chicago in the playoffs for years before the Bulls finally broke through. The 1988-89 season itself ended with a seven-game loss to Cleveland turned into a signature moment -- "The Shot" over Craig Ehlo in the first round -- before Detroit again ended Chicago's season in the Eastern Conference finals. The championships that would define Jordan's legend were still two years away in 1989; this was a superstar fully arrived individually, still searching for the team success to match. The sticker itself comes from Fleer's 1989-90 All-Stars insert set, a run of stickers distributed alongside that year's base basketball issue and built around the league's premier players rather than the base checklist. The back of the card carries text about Michael Jordan's achievements, including his scoring records and All-Star appearances, tying the sticker's design directly to the credentials he'd built by that point in his career. It is not Jordan's rookie card -- that distinction belongs to his 1986 Fleer issue, two years after his 1984 debut and Rookie of the Year season -- but it captures him at the peak of his pre-championship ascent, in the uniform and the sticker format that collectors of the era chased pack after pack. Jordan's career would go on to dwarf even this remarkable season. Jordan led the Chicago Bulls to six NBA championships and earned the league's MVP Award five times. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame as a player in 2009. This sticker catches him mid-story: scoring champion, defensive stalwart, All-Star staple, with the titles and the Hall of Fame plaque still ahead of him.