Sakic Sunday: The Pro Set Legacy

A little over 20 years ago, a new company hit the card landscape, and offered the collector yet another choice in the exploding world we all know as card collecting.

Pro Set came to town.  Boy, was it riddled with errors.

The hockey set came to pass as one of the most talked about sets ever, because of the 100+ errors that were spotted on the cards.  Names spelled wrong, incorrect jersey numbers, wrong birth dates, stats that were someone else's, etc etc.  If Pro Set could make the error, it did.

What's the old saying though?  There's no such thing as bad publicity?  These errors, along with the novelty of being a new product, gave Pro Set a brief lift in the early 90's.  Problem was, the company couldn't capitalize on their new found publicity, and wound up dying out within a few years.

Every time I look through the Sakic collection I have, I see these Pro Set cards, and it brings back memories of me in college (the first time) ripping through pack after pack of these cards.  I'll be damned if I know where all those cards are now though...

1991-92, the cards were a little better, still not good enough though to make a dent into the titans that were Topps and Upper Deck.

I would have to say that they are middle of the road...nothing exciting about the cards, but nothing really bad about the design either.  The borderless design was different at the time, so they had that going for them, but that's about it.  What surprised me about these 2 particular cards when I took them out of their pages is this:

Both the cards that I own are in French. I don't have an English version of either of these cards.  I know that my PC of Joe has been lacking in more recent years, but this realization today let me know that the early years of Sakic's card history are not complete for me either.

At least I've got a couple of months to get a list together before I hit the hockey Expo in Toronto in early November.  Everything in my collection can't be big hits bought off of eBay, right?

By the way, the old Nordiques uniforms on the card on the left?  I have a feeling we may be seeing them for real within a couple of years...

Thanks for reading, Robert