CARDBOARDFILE
One season with no licensed cards at all, three years of team bags sold through dealers, and then a single 132-card set that had to hold five years of arrivals.
05 sep 2026
The most important basketball set ever printed exists because Topps gave up on the sport.
I want to lay out how that happened, because the 1986-87 Fleer set gets written about as though somebody planned it, and nobody did. It is the product of a four-year hole in the market that one company created and another walked into.
Topps put out a basketball set for 1981-82, ending a run that went back to 1969-70, and then stopped. It did not print another basketball card until 1992-93.
No official reason has ever been given. What the trade has always said is that nobody was buying them, and there is a physical trace of that: dealers who handled the material report that a great deal of the surviving 1981-82 Topps basketball wax is the X-out version, which is what came back to Topps unsold and was remarked. When a large share of what you can still find is returned stock, the market has told you something.
The league was in a bad way commercially. Television ratings were poor, attendance outside a few cities was thin, and the finals kept producing matchups that did not travel.
It was not only basketball that got dropped. Topps skipped hockey for 1982-83 and 1983-84 as well, and the likeliest reading is that it was retreating to baseball, where Fleer and Donruss had just arrived in 1981 and begun taking its most profitable market.
The difference is what happened next. Topps was back in hockey after two seasons. It stayed out of basketball for eleven.
O-Pee-Chee, meanwhile, never stopped printing hockey at all - which is why a 1979-80 O-Pee-Chee Gretzky exists and there is no Topps equivalent worth the same money.
For the 1982-83 season there were no licensed NBA cards. Not a scarce set, not a regional issue. None.
That is a major North American league going entirely uncarded for a season, and it happened three years into the Bird and Magic era.
Robert Levin saw the gap and took it. Star Company held the NBA licence from 1983 to 1986 and is the only reason the middle of that decade exists on cardboard at all.
But Star was not Topps. The cards went out in sealed polybags, one team to a bag, through a small network of dealers - not in wax packs to every corner shop in America. Most print runs were at or below five thousand.
So Michael Jordan's first licensed card is the 1984-85 Star #101, sold to a few thousand people who knew where to look. It is at 1984-85 Star Michael Jordan #101, and the populations tell the story without help: PSA has recorded 576 copies of it against 28,151 of the Fleer rookie.
Fleer took the licence for 1986-87 and put out 132 cards and 11 stickers.
Because nothing mainstream had been printed since 1981, that set had to absorb five years of arrivals at once. Sports Collectors Digest counts eighteen rookie cards in it, and the list is absurd: Jordan at 57, Barkley at 7, Olajuwon at 82, Ewing at 32, Karl Malone at 68, Drexler at 26, Mullin at 77, Dumars at 27, Worthy at 131.
The 1984 draft class is the clearest case. Olajuwon went first, Jordan third, Barkley fifth. All three had played two full NBA seasons before a card of them reached a normal shop.
And the men who arrived before the blackout are in there too. Larry Bird and Magic Johnson entered the league in 1979 and are card 9 and card 53 of a 1986 set. They are not rookies here - both already had a rookie card, and it is the same one. The 1980-81 Topps set was printed as perforated three-card panels, and panel 6 carries Bird, Julius Erving as a scoring leader, and Magic. Topps caught them, then quit. What the blackout cost was the generation behind them.
One set holding everybody produces a population report that looks like nothing else.
PSA has graded 28,151 copies of the Jordan. It has graded 12,610 of the Olajuwon, 12,463 of the Barkley, 8,125 of the Bird and 8,089 of the Magic. Even the checklist card at 132 has been through PSA 4,405 times.
There is no other basketball set where the fourth and fifth most-graded cards carry five-figure populations. That is what a single 132-card issue looks like when it has to serve as the rookie set for a whole generation.
If Topps had kept its licence through the 1980s, Jordan's rookie is a 1984-85 Topps card printed in the tens of millions and sold at every counter in America, and it is worth a fraction of what card 57 is worth now.
The 1986 Fleer set would be an ordinary issue in an ordinary run of years, and the Star #101 would be a curiosity rather than a six-figure card.
What these cards are worth is not really about the players. It follows from a licensing decision taken in 1982 by people who had concluded basketball was not popular enough to bother with.
The set is at 1986-87 Fleer, and the stickers that came one to a pack - produced in the same numbers as the cards - are at 1986-87 Fleer Stickers.