Parallel mania continues

The third and final envelope from last week's Sportlots purchase finally came in on Thursday, and it contained a nice group of 1995-96 Collectors Choice Players Club parallels.

As you can plainly tell, my madness for parallel cards isn't just a recent thing, it's gone on for about 2 decades now.

I picked out 4 star cards to show off and write briefly about...

I could sit and debate all day about Eric Lindros.  The fact that he missed 2 seasons because of contract disputes still tells me that he was more concerned about being a businessman than he was about being a hockey player.  However, that was his choice to make, and when he was on the ice for the first few seasons of his career, he was a force to be reckoned with.  Concussions are more studied and taken seriously in professional sports today partly because of Eric.

Show me a man that get his feet into skates that were a couple of sizes too small, and I'll show you one of the fastest men ever to play the game of hockey.   When I heard that Paul Coffey wore skates that were too small for his feet, I thought he was crazy.  Here are some teams that you may or may not remember him playing for.   20 games in Hartford.  10 games in Chicago!  18 games in Boston to finish his career.

Is there a less heralded goal scorer in our lifetime than Peter Bondra?   I remembered that Bondra had scored 500 goals in his career, and I knew that he wasn't in the hall of fame, so I wondered if there were any other players that had scored 500 or more goals and weren't HOF members.  There's actually 10!!  Shanahan, Verbeek, Modano, Tkachuk to name 4.

The debate among Leafs Nation members will live on.  Is Mats Sundin the greatest Leaf to have ever worn the blue and white?  I personally would not rank him #1, but top 5 is certainly a worthy place for the big Swede.  Names like Mahovlich, Sittler, Horton and Kennedy are all names that Sundin would have to contend with for #1.

I really did enjoy watching Mats play though.  Even though he refused to waive his no trade clause for the Leafs a few years back, to be honest I'd still rather see that then somebody who was in a hurry to get out of Toronto.  Loyalty is a tough thing to find in today's sports, and Sundin was loyal to the organization right until the end of his last contract.

I still have a lot of these to pickup in order to complete the set, but the Players Club parallels are pretty cheap now, and I should be able to start knocking these off slowly but surely.

Thanks for reading, Robert