1984-85 Star

the set

notes

Star Company held the exclusive NBA licence from 1983 to 1986. In those three years Topps was out of basketball and Fleer had not yet come back, so if a player's first card exists at all, it is a Star card.

Star did not sell in packs. The cards went out in sealed transparent poly bags - a team set or a subset to a bag - through hobby dealers and at NBA arenas. There was no wax, no gum, and no chance of pulling one at a corner shop. A Star advertisement of the time declared a print run of 3,000 sets, though Steve Taft, who has done more work on Star's production than anyone, puts actual output slightly to moderately higher than the declared figures.

That distribution is why these are not called rookie cards. When Beckett launched Beckett Basketball in the spring of 1990, with Jordan on the cover, it designated the Star cards XRC - extended rookie cards - on the grounds that they were not widely available at retail. The label stuck, and the argument over whether it should have has been running ever since.

Then came the counterfeits, and they are the reason this set has the reputation it does.

US Marshals seized more than 125,000 cards believed to be Star fakes. PSA responded by refusing to grade Star cards at all, for years. Beckett continued to grade them throughout. That split - one major grader in, one out - is unusual, and it kept a whole era of basketball cards at arm's length from the biggest population report in the hobby.

PSA has since resumed grading them, which is why a population report for this set exists to read at all. It is a young one: 12,567 cards across the 288 in the set, against tens of thousands for a single card from the 1986 Fleer set that followed.

One point of detail worth carrying, because it is routinely lost in the retelling. The specific counterfeits that caused the trouble - the Shop At Home material and the so-called Type counterfeits of the late 1980s and early 1990s - are not held to have included the 1984-85 Jordan at 101. The set has a counterfeit problem. That does not mean every card in it was among the fakes, and the distinction matters if you are buying.

What the set contains is the reason anyone cares. Michael Jordan appears three times - at 101 in the Chicago team run, at 195, and at 288 at the end of an award subset. John Stockton, Charles Barkley, Hakeem Olajuwon and Sam Perkins all have cards here from their first NBA season, a year before Fleer.

The condition profile is unusually bad and the causes are documented rather than guessed at. Poly bags do not protect corners. Cards were miscut, ink saturation was uneven, and the sheet layout put some cards in positions that guaranteed centring problems. Across all 288 cards PSA has recorded fifteen 10s in total. Not fifteen for a card - fifteen for the set.