Description

This card does not show a rookie. By the time Hoops printed it, Michael Jordan was already six seasons into his career, coming off a 1989-90 campaign that many still consider the peak of his individual scoring. He averaged 33.6 points, 6.9 rebounds and 6.3 assists in 82 games in 1989-90. He scored his career-high 69 points against Cleveland, led the league in points per game and steals, and for the first time added a real three-point shot to his arsenal. MJ made 92 3-pointers, when he had accumulated 68 in his previous 5 seasons and had a .376 percentage when he had never been better that .300. It was, in other words, a season of individual brilliance without a title to show for it. The 1989-90 season was a great year for Michael Jordan, and although it was another year without a championship for the player considered as the future of the NBA, it also was the season of the arrival of Phil Jackson to the Head Coach chair and things started to align for the team who was going to dominate the NBA starting the next year. The season ended with the Detroit Pistons winning their second consecutive NBA championship, beating the Portland Trail Blazers 4 games to 1 in the NBA Finals, with Jordan's Bulls stopped short in the conference finals. In the Playoffs he led the Bulls to Conference Finals and his numbers were even better, in 16 games he averaged 36.7 points, 7.2 rebounds and 6.8 assists. The breakthrough championship was still a year away. This particular card belongs to the gold-bordered All-Star subset that opens the 1990-91 Hoops set, cards numbered 1 through 26, marking Jordan's selection to the NBA's All-Star Game. It sits inside a set that has become one of the most fondly remembered issues of the early-1990s cardboard boom. The complete 1990-91 Hoops basketball set contains 440 standard-size cards, distributed in two series of 336 and 104 cards, issued in 15-card plastic-wrap packs which came 36 to a box, with the color action player photo bordered by gold on the All-Star cards. The set is also remembered for the rookie cards it carries of future stars, though Jordan's own rookie season had come years earlier. The set features the rookie card of Hall of Fame players including Gary Payton. Jordan's career, of course, went on to dwarf what any single card can hold. He played 15 seasons for the Bulls and Wizards, averaging 30.1 points, 6.2 rebounds, 5.3 assists and 2.3 steals in 1,072 regular-season games, was selected to play in 14 All-Star games, won Rookie of the Year, one Defensive Player of the Year award, five MVP awards, six Finals MVP awards and six NBA championships, and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2009. He would go on to become the sport's defining figure of the decade that followed this card's release, a run that began in earnest the very next season, when he finally reached and won his first NBA Finals. What this card preserves, then, is Jordan at a specific hinge point: already the league's most explosive scorer, already an annual All-Star, but still chasing the ring that would define the second half of his career. Issued in a set collectors still return to for its design and its era, it is a snapshot of the "almost" years before everything changed.