Hooray! Hockey Stickers!

As the baseball offseason slowly approaches like the walk of death, that means that we're in the transitioning phase right now. Baseball is winding down, football is well underway, preseason basketball is heating up, soccer is happening somewhere in the rest of the world, and regular season hockey is almost upon us!

As of this post I'm still not exactly a hockey "expert" or superfan. I'm just a regular fan who likes the New York Rangers. Especially their prospects. But I do like the team a lot, even if they don't have much of a shot at a postseason run this season. I support the Rangers' current rebuild where they're not tanking/losing on purpose, but they know they're not good enough to contend so they're on standby looking to make shrewd trades to make their 2019 NHL Draft selections so much better, and to give them just enough cap space to sign some big name free agents to speed up the rebuild process (looking at you Artemi Panarin).

But of course, this kind of thinking/fanalysis lends itself to going down a very dangerous hole. One where I start looking at players as names on a spreadsheet and as assets like they're account names on a Balance Sheet.

So to remedy that I rely on things like cards, and stickers to help me attach a human face to a name.

Which finally brings me to today's topic. The 2018-19 Panini-brand NHL Stickers are finally out and I grabbed a the official sticker book as well as some packs while at Modell's.

I tried building last year's book right after the season ended (bad idea), and failed. This season I'm not sure if I'm going to attempt to build the entire set, but I'm definitely motivated to finish off the Rangers team set. Why?

Because my boy Filip Chytil is in it! Woooooo!!!

Of course other players I really like like Mats Zuccarello, Pavel Buchnevich and Neal Pionk are represented too. As well as the King Henrik Lundqvist and long time veteran, Marc Staal.

Anyway Chytil is/was priority number one. As luck would have it I found a somewhat shady way to find him.

You see the packs this year are manufactured in a way where you can see through the other side and see which number the very last sticker is. Doing this I managed to find 170 (you can sort of see it on the scan too), which is Chytil's sticker number.

I also plucked out other packs in the 160's (the Rangers numbers) and several of the single digit ones.

I'd like to think that what I did wasn't pack searching since I didn't thumb my way through it or violate the packs so as to damage the insides. All I did was just turn them over and look at the number staring back at me through the cheap packaging. Kind of like seeing the first card through those thin plastic rack pack wrappers of Heritage or Archives. But I also kinda sensed that I was doing a lot of mental gymnastics to convince myself that I wasn't cheating.

Ultimately my concerns were quelled when a staff member/security guard standing a few feet away from me didn't tell me to stop. Good enough for me.

So with that trick, I managed to land not one but two Chytil stickers. Which was huge for me because eBay is running out of these quick.

Other Rangers I managed to get where Kevin Shattenkirk, King Hank, Mika Zibanejad and Kevin Hayes. Two of these were picked up deliberately, the other two just showed in the packs by pure happenstance.

This year the packs only contain five stickers per pack, down from seven per pack last season and pretty much on par with the FIFA World Cup stickers released earlier this year.

Here are some notable names I pulled.
Panarin is interesting because he's a really good winger who's set to be an unrestricted free agent at a really young age. He's also said to want to come to the Rangers. Getting someone like him (and Jacob Trouba down the line) would speed up the Rangers' rebuild immensely.

Matt Duchene is interesting, not particularly because of who he is himself, but because of the trade that brought him to the Ottawa Senators. Duchene was originally a Colorado Avalanche centre and one of the better players on the team. He was traded to the Senators in a three team trade in exchange for a big haul that included a protected first round draft pick. The Senators opted to keep their first round pick in the 2018 draft and will part with their pick in the 2019 draft instead. Which will turn out to be a really dumb move because in the 2018 draft they only had the fourth overall pick (they drafted Brady Tkachuk). In 2019 they're a strong contender for the first overall pick because their team is garbage. They were always going to be terrible, and pretty much cemented their horribleness when they traded away the franchise's best defenseman (Erik Karlsson) to the San Jose Sharks for... nothing.
But they have to forfeit that pick to the Avalanche because of the Duchene trade. So Colorado is in the most ideal spot ever. They're going to contend in the Western Conference and they're going to get a first overall (or no worse than top three) pick in the 2019 draft. Incredible. This is why I'm interested in hockey, we don't have boneheaded dumb things like that happen in baseball. For good or for bad.

Lastly there's Nico Hischier. Last year's rookie class featured a lot of solid names and Hischier was chief among them. The 19 year old Swiss forward has established himself as a good young piece for the New Jersey Devils to build around for years to come.

These are the only two special shiny stickers I pulled (outside of a few of the awards stickers I'm going to show shortly). A cute and very cool caricature of future HoFer Roberto Luongo and a team logo sticker for the Tampa Bay Lightning.

Plucking out the single digit cards (most of them anyway), allowed me to get seven of the nine award cards. These awards all the hockey equivalent of awards like MVP, Cy Young, ROY, along with gold gloves and a lifetime achievement award.

So all in all I managed to get NINE Rangers (including a Chytil dupe).
Which is perfect because I plan on using Panini's online services to get the rest of the stickers I need for the Rangers (and the last two Award stickers I need).

Also, the trick I mentioned earlier works with NFL stickers too. As the Eli Manning there proves.

I'm not 100% sure if I'll go after the rest of the sticker book after that (probably not), but I'm strangely addicted to this. Part of me really wants to see this through. The other part doesn't want to because this book has a lot more stickers to chase than the previous edition (the stickers per team went from 13 to 20!).

As always thanks for stopping by and take care :).