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Professional ice hockey leagues formed in the U.S. and Canada in the early 20th century, with the National Hockey League getting its start in Montreal in 1910. Like baseball and football, cards associated with the sport were there from the...
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Professional ice hockey leagues formed in the U.S. and Canada in the early 20th century, with the National Hockey League getting its start in Montreal in 1910. Like baseball and football, cards associated with the sport were there from the beginning. The first hockey cards were issued for the 1910/1911 season by Imperial Tobacco. There were 36 vertical cards in the set, each featuring an illustration of a player on the front and a handful of details about him on the back—you can’t even call them stats. For the 1911/1912 season, Imperial got a bit fancier, framing each of the 45 players on the fronts of its second, and last, set of cards with hockey sticks. The information on the backs of the cards was also given a more ornate graphic treatment. Collectible cards from this series include Georges Vézina of the Montreal Canadiens—Vézina is one of the Hockey Hall of Fame’s original 12 members. Ice hockey then went without player cards for two full decades until 1933, when Canadian chewing gum companies O-Pee-Chee and Ice Kings issued separate sets of vintage hockey cards. The Ice Kings set featured black-and-white photos of players, with stats and descriptions on the backs of the cards in English only. The O-Pee-Chee cards also had black-and-white photos of players on their fronts, but the images were placed against a colored background (red, blue, orange, or green), in the center of which was a large six-pointed star surrounded by smaller stars. Importantly, the backs of these cards were in both English and French, which may have been one reason why the OPC cards, as they are known, continued to be printed throughout the rest of the decade. Other OPC cards from the 1930s and early 1940s included a diecut series, which allowed the owner to bend the card in the middle so that it could stand up on its own. An unfolded copy of legendary Boston Bruins defenseman Eddie Shore is highly collectible. OPC also produced a black-and-white set of 100 larger...
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Hockeylegend.com
Scott Petterson’s personal collection of vintage ice hockey memorabilia focuses on the history...

Best of the Web

Hockeylegend.com
Scott Petterson’s personal collection of vintage ice hockey memorabilia focuses on the history...