Has there ever been a more self-reflexive team card? This could only be topped by the Utah Jazz striking up the band with a few guys strung out on heroin in the background, or the Orlando Magic sawing each other in half in front of a group of bored kids. Actually, you know what they should do. They should make a subset of Team Tableaus, where the team has to act to out the team name. I see the Trail Blazers in furs and pelts, getting high out in the woods with Sacagawea, Golden State Warriors fucking each other up on the streets of 1970s New York City...wait, wrong Warriors...Knicks crowding a back room all dandied up with watch fobs and pince-nez, slapping each other on the backs and surrounded by servants, Chicago Bulls in black and white striped shirts and red ascots 'round their necks, fleeing for their lives down Michigan Avenue. You get the idea.
I wouldn't be surprised if you could have found this image on the inside of a matchbook, or on a male escort postcard tacked to the inside of a public phone booth in London. Seriously, the only thing that's missing is that the team isn't wearing tuxedos. Slick Watts is wearing his headband and wristbands, the white guys all have bushy mustaches, and Bill Russell's out front like Ricardo Montalban from Fantasy Island.
Hello all you foxy ladies. If there's anything you need--anything at all--just call upon my team of Supersonics. They're here for your pleasure and convenience. Spencer! Archie! Slick! Help make our beautiful guests a little more comfortable. I'm Bill Russell, but you can call me Captain Wonderful. Next stop: your wildest, most basketball-related fantasies.
By the way, do you think Slick Watts wore his headband and wristbands at all times, on and off the court? I'm thinking the answer is Yes, with a capital 'Y.' And by 'at all times' I'm including when he showered, slept (hair net and oven mitts for protection), sat in jury duty, bought groceries, built computers in his garage with his dorky friends and attended black tie events with other pillars of the community.
I mean, they were the source of his powers, right?
I bring this up because I’ve been trying to figure out just where 1994 fits in. The year saw Upper Deck’s and Score’s first parallel sets and the first Bowman’s Best set, all of which clearly expanded the hobby landscape in a technical sense (I’m not counting UD’s gold hologram set from 1993, as that was released in factory-set form only). But it also saw the introduction of one of the decade’s defining rookies in Alex Rodriguez, a player who has become so important that all rankings, lists and analysis of sets from his rookie year must be made with his inclusion in mind.
Goudey Trade-away #46: Tekulve and Bottalico for Mulder and Vidro
I'm fairly confident I have a firm grasp on the way the world works. Let me rephrase that. I was fairly confident. Now I'm not so sure. I found this 1981-82 card of Foots Walker today at the White Plains show in White Plains, New York, and it's existence, well really the existence of Foots Walker himself, has thrown my understanding of the world under the bus.
And just one more word about the ‘Kids Kards’ movement. 1992’s Topps Kids was a great set, but whereas Topps created it by removing the bells and whistles from their other sets from that year, the great thing about the Fun Pack sets was that all that extraneous bullshit that made inserts great was included within the base set. Maybe that’s why these sets seemed to do better than the noble Topps Kids experiment: kids like shiny things. They like interactive, over-the-top bullshit with bells and whistles. 
I just finished reading a rough draft treatment I wrote last year about how the explosion of card production in the early Nineties pretty much set the table for the implosion at the end of the decade. To illustrate this, I had singled out 1991. My thesis was that this year more than any other should be recognized as the true starting point for the premium card era, and that combining perceived value with vast over-production allowed for card companies to claim limited availability while cranking out the crap.
It’s also interesting to note that while Donruss was busy pushing the camera back, Score was eagerly pulling it closer. 1990 saw the pastel introduction of Score’s Dream Team subset, and while the subset became the Oddly Homoerotic Dream Team in 1991 (at least three cards featured shirtless torsos: Jose Canseco, Rickey Henderson, Kirby Puckett), the factory-set-only Cooperstown insert set took the pastels to their soft focus, ethereal pinnacle. It was almost like Score had out-Diamond King'd Donruss.