Read time: 8 min.

I had a lot of fun going through some of my old basketball cards last year. I swore I’d never collect them again en masse, but I found myself at Meijer just before my hernia surgery. I picked up a 2022-23 Panini Donruss box on a whim. It’d been twenty years since I last indulged in the thrill of opening a fresh pack of cards, and a rush of nostalgia washed over me. Will I do it again? Probably not.

I was a hardcore collector of basketball cards as a kid. I had thousands of them. I tried my best to fill out each set every year so I could run my own personal fantasy leagues! The last box I ever bought was the Fleer Tradition base series from 2004-2005. I was fourteen. It contained thirty-six packs of ten cards each, and I think I paid $40. This one cost $29.99 and consisted of fifteen cards per pack and six packs per box.

Thirty-three cents per card compared to eleven? Hmm. A lot has changed since I last bought a box! Unfortunately, there’s no more Fleer, Flair, Upper Deck, Topps, or anything else as far as basketball goes. Today, an Italian company called Panini owns the NBA’s exclusive license and divides its cards into two segments. One consists of astronomically expensive hobby boxes with valuable cards. Cheap retail boxes like I picked up at Meijer comprise the other.

I opened my box right after I got home after surgery. It was comically empty, almost like a fresh bag of chips. Despite that, I hoped to rediscover a piece of my childhood buried beneath layers of adult responsibilities. With a new binder, some top loaders, and a surge of painkillers coursing through my nervous system, I got to cracking.

1st pack

I reached inside and pulled out the first pack. I’d forgotten what the crinkle of the foil wrapper felt like! On first glance, I received some decent cards in that initial pack. Base cards are unimpressive, but at least I got a Dillon Brooks “Base Holo Green Laser,” whatever that is.

Aside from base cards of hall-of-famers like Russell Westbrook, I pulled a couple “Rated Rookies” of unknowns, Ousmane Dieng and Max Christie, that represent the future of the sport. Brooks’ cards were on fire sale online after he torpedoed the Memphis Grizzlies in last year’s playoffs, but he’s had a good year in Houston. None of these base cards are worth much, but into the binder they went.

2nd pack

I was transported back to my childhood, surrounded by binders of meticulously organized cards, as I ripped open the second pack. It provided another Base Holo Green Laser, this time of Peyton Watson. Cards like it sell for $2.34 since his team, the Denver Nuggets, won their first championship last year. Unfortunately, Watson didn’t contribute much to the stat sheet.

Aside from my second laser variant, I also got one of Watson’s regular rookie cards and one of Shaedon Sharpe’s. Sharpe had a great rookie year for Portland, and I expect big things from him moving forward. His Panini Donruss base series rookie card won’t light up the marketplace, but I bought my box to have fun, not cash in.

3rd pack

It’s sort of fun to look at old basketball cards to see who was immortalized on the front. As a kid, I ripped open packs that featured everyone from Michael Jordan to nobodies like Adam Morrison. Chet Holmgren was on the front of my box from Meijer, and my third pack contained his rookie card. It looks like he’s going to pan out.

It’s surprising to hear about a youngster named Chet since we’re no longer in the Dust Bowl era. During his lone year at Gonzaga, Holmgren averaged 14.1 points, 3.7 blocks, and 9.9 rebounds a game. It was enough to entice the Oklahoma City Thunder to pick him second in the 2022 draft. He missed his entire first season with an injury, but since Chet’s been on the mend it looks like he might win Rookie of the Year in 2024. Even if he retires as the GOAT in twenty years, my common card isn’t likely to appreciate much.

The rest: lasers

I started nodding off as I opened my fourth pack. I was groggy from the anesthesia, loopy from the pain pills, and slowly realizing that cracking packs wasn’t as much fun as I remembered. Nevertheless, I kept at it and wound up with ten of those over-the-top green laser parallels. Despite the thrill of rediscovering the world of basketball cards, I was realizing that too much had changed for me to enjoy them as I did when I was young.

Gone are the days of trading duplicates with my friends in hopes of completing a set. Despite how many green laser holo cards I got, it turns out that they sit near the bottom of a hierarchy that includes blue lasers, light blue lasers, red lasers, gold lasers, red and gold lasers, purple lasers, and all other manner of more expensive and confusing parallels I don’t care about! No one could possibly collect them all. As an adult, the basic cards I cherished as treasures twenty years ago feel more like commodities to be bought and sold in a never-ending cycle. More to the point, my favorites feel cheap.

The rest: inserts

That’s not a groundbreaking insight by any means, but it took a heavy dose of post-surgery Norco to realize that’s the point of anything with manufactured scarcity. Fortunately for me, I never put two and two together as a kid. I just liked collecting cards! I particularly loved inserts, any non-base and non-parallel cards of a specific set with their own themes and numberings. My Panini Donruss box contained six. The Bomb Squad cards of Steph Curry and Dominique Wilkins are the coolest.

The Curry card looks to be the most “valuable” of my haul, with ungraded examples selling for $3.69 on COMC. The rest of the cards are hit-and-miss. No one would call Keldon Johnson a “franchise feature.” Jaden Ivey is a promising Boilermaker from South Bend mired on the worst team in the league, and Christian Braun won a championship during his first year. Luka Dončić is as close to a magician as you could find on a basketball court, but the “Magicians” series is Word-art ugly. Mine was even worn along its top edge straight out of the pack. Thanks, Panini.

The rest: rookies

Aside from the Shaedon Sharpe and Peyton Watson Rated Rookie Base Holo Green Laser cards, I ended up with eighteen other cards of first-year players. I received multiples of guys like Malaki Branham, Mark Williams, and Bryce McGowens. I hadn’t heard of any of them before, but I looked into their young careers.

Mark Williams shows promising signs as a center this season, but he’s stuck on the miserable Hornets. I’m still big on Chet, Shaedon Sharpe, and Peyton Watson, but aside from Jeremy Sochan of the San Antonio Spurs, I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the rookies on my cards washed out of the league within the next three years. Unfortunately, that’s usually how it goes in the NBA.

Of course, I felt the same about a little-known guard out of Davidson named Stephen Curry fourteen years ago when I bought a 2009-10 Panini base series pack. I was ecstatic to pull Blake Griffin’s rookie card since he seemed like a sure-fire superstar, but Curry became a ten-time all-star, a four-time champion, a lock for the Basketball Hall of Fame, and the greatest shooter in NBA history. 

Today, Griffin cards like mine sell for $1.58. Curry rookies go for $500 ungraded. Shows what I know! Maybe Ousmane Dieng or Max Christie will become the face of the league. Just in case, I transferred all my new cards into a binder and haven’t touched them since.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t get my money’s worth in terms of value, but that wasn’t the point. The problem was that I wasn’t sure I’d received $30 worth of fun, either. When I was young, I measured the joy of collecting basketball cards by the simple pleasure of finding my favorite players and completing the checklists. Commercialism, consumerism, and hype have always been a big part of basketball cards, but I didn’t care about that as a kid. Now, it seems like you almost have to. I’m not interested. I’ll keep buying individual cards of my favorite obscure players, but I think I’m done with boxes for good.