Description

This card is not Michael Jordan's rookie — that came four years earlier, in 1986 Fleer — but it captures the moment his career finally clicked into place. By the time Skybox launched its first basketball set in 1990-91, Jordan already had four straight scoring titles and a stack of individual hardware. What he did not have was a championship, and the league's memory bank kept reminding him of it: no scoring champion had won a title since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 1971, and Jordan's Bulls had been shoved aside by Detroit's Pistons in the conference finals two years running. The 1990-91 season is where that changed. Jordan won another scoring title averaging 31.5 points, 6.0 rebounds, 5.5 assists and 2.7 steals per game, and won his second NBA Most Valuous Player of the Year award, was also named to the All-NBA First Team, and to the NBA All-Defensive First Team. The Bulls tore through the regular season, then swept New York, beat Philadelphia, swept a Detroit team that had haunted them, and finally dethroned Magic Johnson's Lakers in the Finals. Jordan led his team to the title averaging 31.2 points, 6.6 rebounds and 11.4 assists, and picked up the first of his six Finals MVP awards. The championship drought was over, and the next decade of the NBA would belong to him. Skybox arrived in the middle of that turn. This 1990-91 set marks SkyBox's entry into the basketball card market. The complete set contains 423 standard-size cards featuring NBA players, released in two series of 300 and 123 cards, respectively. It was a new manufacturer trying to distinguish itself in a market that had been Fleer and Topps territory, and putting the league's best player and reigning MVP at card #41 gave collectors their first look at Jordan through a brand-new lens — an action shot on a computer-generated background, the player's name in a black stripe with the team logo at the lower corner, the whole photo bordered in gold. The rest of Jordan's career only built on what 1990-91 started. He would finish with 32,292 career points, ten scoring titles, six championships, six Finals MVPs and five regular-season MVPs, and was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2009. But none of that was guaranteed when this card was printed — it shows a 27-year-old who had just broken through, not yet the six-time champion the game would remember. For collectors, this card marks two firsts at once: the season Jordan stopped being merely brilliant and started being a champion, and the set that introduced Skybox itself to the hobby.