Sunday Night Hockey

It's mid-July and here in New England we're in the middle of a pretty good heat wave, with temps in the '90s or above just about every day lately.  What better time to look at some hockey cards, right?  Well, not really, but I have a bunch of saved scans of hockey cards in my drafts folder, so I threw 20 of them together and that's the best I've got for a post tonight.  Consider this some hockey filler while I work on a couple of trade posts and a few other things I have going.

To lead things off I've got a couple of Upper Deck Canvas inserts.  The great goal-cam shot of Brad Marchand above is from the first year that Upper Deck began doing the Canvas inserts.  Brad and the B's are currently engaged in negotiations to extend his contract, if you can believe what you hear on sports talk radio in these parts that is.

From a later Canvas release, here's Ducks captain Ryan Getzlaf celebrating with his teammates.  I look forward to these inserts year in and year out, in fact I really need to get off my butt and finish off the 2015-16 set while they're still going for insanely cheap prices over on COMC.

I didn't get a whole lot of exposure to the most recent O-Pee-Chee set, mostly due to the fact that I don't buy all that much current wax any more.  I was able to pick up a nice trio of these retro inserts from a seller on Sportlots though.  A couple of Bruins in young forward David Pastrnak...

...and center David Krejci.  The B's are completely stacked down the middle heading into 2015-16 as free agent signing David Backes now joins Krejci and Patrice Bergeron at the position.  We'll see how that signing pans out, but in the meantime I sure hope the front office has something in mind for solidifying the defensive corps.

Of course I had to grab what I believe is the only Hartford Whaler on the checklist, goaltender Mike Liut.  Love those pads!

Champ's hockey was just recently released as a set for the first time since this 2009-10 issue.  I haven't gotten my mitts on any of the new stuff yet, but I'm always on the lookout for a cheap one-per-box yellow parallel from the original release.

Let's keep moving along with some O-Pee-Chee Platinum parallels.  While I don't really seek these out all that actively, I'm game for any parallels of players that interest me.  This Bergeron is a Red Prism, serial-numbered to /135.

The Traxx parallels aren't serial-numbered, but they look incredible and in fact may be my favorite of the various flavors available in this set.  Couldn't resist the opportunity to add this shiny card of one of the best pure goal scorers in the history of the league.

Next we've got a couple of the high number cards from 2013-14 Score, a set I've been very slowly chipping away at for more than a couple of years now.  Still looks odd seeing Alfredsson in anything but an Ottawa sweater.

The other Score high number from this lot is Bruins forward Loui Eriksson.  Loui's time in Boston is already over, as he signed a long-term deal with the Canucks just a couple of weeks ago.  With that, the last remnant of the trade that sent this guy to Dallas is now gone:

Yeah, that trade is not looking so good at this point.  With Taylor Hall now in New Jersey, it's interesting that neither Seguin or Hall are still with the team that drafted them at this point.  These Prizm Cracked Ice parallels are really stunning.  This is just my third one to date, but I'll be keeping an eye out for others in the future.

After the impressive season that he just turned in at his age, it's been fun adding some new Jagr cards to my collection.

While these aren't necessarily anything special, I didn't have a ton of cardboard representing his time in New Jersey.  Of course it helps that each was available for the minimum 18 cents on Sportlots.

Same here, nice to finally cross his 2015-16 Upper Deck flagship card off of my want list.

A nice Gold parallel rounds out the Jagr portion of this post.

Here's a pretty sweet piece of cardboard for a Whalers fan like myself!  These 1990-91 Upper Deck buybacks were a pretty tough pull, with each being hand numbered to /25.  One of my biggest hobby misses over the years was being out-sniped on a Ron Francis for around $10.  Ugh!  I'll probably never even see one of those again.  Oh well, Todd Krygier is a nice enough consolation prize, as these are rare enough that really any of them are a decent win for a team collector.

Ah, the Upper Deck "Electric" parallels of the mid-'90s.  As junk wax era hockey cards go, it doesn't get much better than a Wayne Gretzky parallel.

One more Canvas card snuck in here.  Like pretty much every Canvas card I pick up, the outstanding photograph is what sold me here.  You don't see a whole lot of pre-game warm-up shots, and I really like the angle on this one.

Casual sports fans who don't catch a lot of NHL hockey probably have not heard of Craig Smith of the Predators.  A fourth round draft pick back in 2009, he has quietly put together three consecutive 20-goal seasons for Nashville.  He's got enough upside that I felt like 75 cents was a solid deal for his short-printed Young Guns rookie.

I'll end it here for tonight with another name that may not be recognizable to folks not following the league closely, young center Vincent Trocheck.  Vincent played what was really his first full NHL season last year at age 22 and definitely impressed.  He lit the lamp 25 times, and had even more assists than that.  Not bad for someone who can barely drink legally and was logging second line minutes most of the time.

So yeah, 20 new hockey cards.  Now it's back to Red Sox/Yankees baseball...