Minor League Hockey Cards

To the surprise of absolutely no one, I've been on a hockey kick recently. More specifically minor league hockey. That also shouldn't be a surprise.

These are exciting times to be a fan of the New York Rangers and minor league hockey players. The Rangers are in a transition/rebuild phase where they're looking to build the next great Rangers team, and the young players they've got now are really exciting and figure to either be the next key pieces of the core going forward, or solid complimentary pieces surrounding whoever does end up being the core of the team.

So what better way to learn about minor league players (or potentially rookies) than through cards? As a guy who absolutely loves minor league baseball cards I'm super keen on learning the similarities and differences between baseball and hockey cards. So let's begin!

#1 Minor League Team Issues

Much like their baseball counterpart, hockey teams do have their own minor league issues. Some I purchased recently were made by a very familiar company.

CHOICE!

At this point I've declared Choice to be the number one minor league sports card company. They've made cards for the Staten Island Yankees, Trenton Thunder, Pulaski Yankees and Scranton Wilkes Barre Railriders, and now I find that they've made hockey cards for the Hartford Wolf Pack. The Wolf Park are the Rangers' AHL affiliate and the closest they've got to a triple-A affiliate.

The Gilmour card above borrows the 2016 Topps design but the back does a lot more than the original 2016 Topps back did. Featuring lots of details (mostly accolades) involving Gilmour. Love it.

I picked up some more Rangers prospects on cards made by Choice. Thanks to a eBay coupon brought to my attention by The Lost Collector, I managed to get my first taste of authentic minor league hockey cards.

The interesting thing about these is that the sizes of these cards varied. For the most part they're all your standard card size and fit in binder pages/sleeves with ease, but the Gettinger is the closest to an actual normal card and the other two are cut slightly thinner. You don't really notice it at first but when you stack all three together you can see the difference.

Still, I love minor league issues and I'm super glad hockey has their fair share of them too.

So there's one familiar concept down, the team issues. But then that leads to the next big question. Is there a mainstream prospect oriented hockey product.

#2 Mainstream Prospect Cards

When I say "mainstream" I mean cards that were distributed outside the arena the minor league teams play in. Or in other words, they're made by Upper Deck.

As far as I can tell there is no "Bowman" equivalent in the world of hockey. At best you've got the Young Guns rookie cards which are the "premium rookie cards" for the players who're lucky enough to be shown on them. But they're more akin to Topps flagship rookies more than they are to BoChro autos.

So if there's no Bowman, the next logical step is to wonder if there's a hockey version of Topps Pro Debut. There is.

This Sean Day is from the 2017-18 Upper Deck CHL set. UD's approach to prospect cards is to release entire sets dedicated to individual leagues. So there's a set for the Canadian Hockey League and one for the American Hockey League (possibly more but I couldn't find them).

This Chris Nell is from the AHL set.
Both cards are made similar to the flagship Upper Deck hockey cards only with a big less gloss on the front (makes it easier for signatures I suppose).

These very much remind me of Topps Pro Debut. Top prospects depicted in their minor league uniforms and their minor league teams? Yeah that's Pro Debut material right there. Even if you expanded it back to the original Tri-Star era Pro Debut concept.

Of course these are cool in their own way and I personally love the concept of card sets devoted to leagues. It appears as though both the AHL and CHL team sets are primarily made up of 100 cards each along with 50 short prints and fair bit of inserts and hits here and there. Very cool.

#3 Non-License Holders

So far we have the equivalents for the minor league team issues and Pro Debut down, but there is one area of card prospecting left to explore. The cards made by companies that don't have a license or permission to use logos. Choice (and any other company that may may minor league cards) get permission to use logos courtesy of the team that enlisted their services. Upper Deck has permission to use logos because they're the exclusive holder of all NHL related logos and trademarks (a monopoly isn't just a hockey thing people!). So of course that leaves the third parties. The ones that technically have permission thanks to the Players Union that allows them to make cards with the players' likeness and names, but nothing more.

In the baseball world that tends to fall on companies like Panini and Leaf. As far as Panini is concerned they only make the hockey stickers and nothing more since Upper Deck got the exclusive NHL rights (apparently not for stickers though, go figure). So that leaves Leaf free to make some cards using any means possible to get around the lack of logos.

Scan courtesy of COMC

For the most part Leaf tried getting around it by using minor league logos that they could get but that appears to have largely stopped. Nowadays they make things like entire sets dedicated to established big league goaltenders but without any team names or logos. As such you end up with pretty ugly cards like the one above.

Forgive me but for this part I decided not to pick up any cards on my to see how these are. I'm on a strict budget and these would've made me go over it by a lot. Also these cards look pretty ugly. Lots of open space, no photos and sticker autographs.

So with that, I think we can close the books on this research (for now) and determine that, yes, minor leagues are just as lively and in existence in hockey as they are in baseball.

I love minor league sports. I can't wait to go see my first ever minor league hockey game this year (if I can). Hartford (or Bridgeport?) here I come!

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