1981-82 O-Pee-Chee

the set

notes

Paul Coffey's rookie card has been graded more often than the Wayne Gretzky in the same set.

That is the fact to start with, because it is unusual and because it is the shape of this whole issue. O-Pee-Chee printed 396 cards for 1981-82, and seven future Hall of Famers have their rookie card among them - more than any hockey set of the period.

Coffey at 111, Jari Kurri at 107, Glenn Anderson at 108, Denis Savard at 63, Dino Ciccarelli at 161, Larry Murphy at 148 and Peter Stastny at 269. Kevin Lowe at 117, Andy Moog at 120 and Dale Hunter at 277 are rookies too, and while those three are not in the Hall they had long careers and their cards are collected.

Three of the seven are Edmonton Oilers. Coffey, Kurri and Anderson all debut here, in the set that follows 1980-81 O-Pee-Chee where Mark Messier had his.

Card 1 is Ray Bourque

The set opens with Bourque's second-year card, the year after his rookie appeared at 140 of the previous set.

Gretzky is on six cards: 106 and 125 are both straight Gretzky cards, 126 is an Oilers Leaders, 383 an Assists Leader, 384 a Scoring Leader and 392 a Record Breaker. A listing that says 1981 O-Pee-Chee Gretzky is not telling you which one.

What PSA has recorded

Read on 16 September 2026. Across the 396 cards PSA has recorded 33,241 base grades and 2,471 are PSA 10 - a gem rate of 7.4 per cent.

That is almost identical to the 1980-81 set at 7.7, and high for cards of this age. O-Pee-Chee's stock and printing in these years were better than their reputation; what they were bad at was cutting.

PSA's own header for this set gives 34,579. The difference is 425 half grades and 908 qualified copies, which the figures on this site do not include. The cards quoted here are base grades throughout, for every set.

Five cards in this report are not from this set

PSA's O-Pee-Chee listing carries 401 entries for a 396-card set. The five extra are these, one graded copy each: Derek Smith at 79 East, Rob Ramage at 84 West, Bob Dailey at 104 East, Greg Miller at 115 East and Blake Dunlop at 117 West.

Those are Topps cards. For 1981-82 Topps split its set into three parts - a national run of 1 to 66, then cards 67 to 132 issued twice, once as an East series and once as a West series, distributed regionally. O-Pee-Chee did no such thing and ran a single 396-card checklist.

Every one of the five falls inside 67 to 132, every one carries an East or West designation, and every one has exactly one graded copy. They are Topps cards filed under the wrong set.

We have excluded them from the figures on this page. The checklist below is the 396 O-Pee-Chee cards, numbered 1 to 396 with no gaps.

Where the difficulty is

Coffey is the hardest of the rookie class to find perfect, at 0.92 per cent, and the most submitted card in the set at 2,709 copies. Kurri gems at 2.31, Savard at 2.19, Anderson at 1.74.

At the other end, Dale Hunter at 277 gems at 9.20 per cent from 250 copies, Ciccarelli at 161 does 6.18 and Larry Murphy at 148 does 5.95.

So the famous rookies are the hard ones and the quiet ones are the easy ones, which is the usual pattern and is about who submits rather than how the cards were cut.