Last season's Fleer Basketball set was a pretty good celebration of the 20th anniversary of the famous set that gave us (among many others) Michael Jordan rookie cards, not to mention a pretty good low end set in its own right. Faced with coming up with an encore for 2007-08, Upper Deck made some changes but kept the basics the same, including a nod to the cards of the late 80's.
Boxes of 2007-08 Fleer Basketball contain 16 packs of 15 cards each. On average, you can expect to find four memorabilia or autographed cards per box and a rookie card in each pack.
Base Cards
The 2007-08 Fleer Basketball base card design looks similar to last year's but with more color. That's because the white borders have been replaced with team colors, with a white stripe running through the center. Player and team information is located in a gray box at the bottom.
Once again, the first 200 cards are NBA veterans, allowing for a nice amount of players from each team. There are also 35 rookies falling one per pack, which means only 16 rookies per box compared to 36 in 2006-07. This is a little bit of a negative, as the added difficulty in finishing off the set isn't likely to be offset by any additional value for the rookie cards, which are still plentiful in the grand theme of things.
On the flip side, collation is once again excellent, and anyone who purchases a full box will pull all the veterans or come pretty darn close. I opened two boxes of Fleer Basketball for this review and found all 200 veterans in the first box (plus 16 rookies and four duplicates) and came up just one card short in the second box (with four dupes and 16 more rookies, though I had two duplicates there too).
Memorabilia and Autographed Cards
There's no question that Upper Deck helped Fleer Basketball out a lot in this area, going from one memorabilia card per box last season to four this time around. Since the price of the product didn't really increase, it hardly matters that a lot of the extra swatches come in the form of photo shoot-worn gear in the NBA Classics set, which features 33 rookies.
The other memorabilia insert is Feel the Game, which isn't a standout in terms of design but does have a really nice checklist that includes some big names, past and present: Jordan, Bird, Magic, LeBron, Kobe and Carmelo are among the 40 players. The Michael Jordan Missing Links set also offers up six more cards, and pulling a game-worn jersey card of His Airness is never a bad thing.
My review boxes ran fairly close to what I expected. Box one revealed a Feel the Game Larry Bird and NBA Classics cards of Jeff Green, Aaron Gray and Wilson Chandler. Box Two produced Grant Hill and Jason Kidd Feel the Game cards, along with NBA Classics cards of Al Thornton and Spencer Hawes.
Finally, though they aren't listed on the official set website, venerable Autographics cards are inserted into some boxes of Fleer Basketball. I found a Solomon Jones card in my second box, and while the player may not have been the best, it was nice to see the old favorite still representing with on-card signatures.
Insert Cards
Fleer loses most of its pedestrian inserts to focus on more cards with throwback designs. Last season there was a whole set printed on the 1986-87 design, but this year the red, white and blue layout is reserved for 30 86-87 Retro Rookies.
The full set treatment gets moved up a year, with 132 NBA players of today presented on an 87-88 Retro design. The two-tone team names at the top are undeniably cheesy, but the cards are still cool. Upper Deck did a great job getting the retro cards to not only look but feel the same way the originals did 20 years ago.
The final old school touch is given to 66 cards in the self-explanatory 61-62 Retro set, but these are much less common, as I found none in either sample box. I did pull a total of 16 86-87 Retro Rookies and 24 87-88 Retro cards.
The Last Word
In just its second year back off the scrap heap, Fleer Basketball has become an excellent low end brand. The new pack configuration may not suit all collectors, but box and pack value still hold up, and best of all for a product like this, the base set isn't too hard to put together.
I preferred last season's design but the 2007-08 content, so that's a wash. With a winning combination of old and new, Fleer Basketball scores again.