The third year of Starting Lineup cards featured a brown theme, an unusual color to see on cards. I only have three of them- I don't have ANY of the 2nd year of SLU release, either figures or cards. There were only 5 of them, and they were issued regionally in Cleveland and Charlotte. When I began collecting SLUs in 1996 they were still talking about how rare the 1989s were. Of course, now there's a little something called Ebay that didn't exist back then, so I don't know...

I love the bright yellow borders of the 4th year of SLUs. Yellow had rapidly grown to become my second favorite color, after green. In fact, as I'm typing this on June 21st, 2018, I'm wearing a yellow shirt and green pants!

This was the last year where Kenner produced their own cards for the SLU figures. They also came with posters. I have the Hakeem Olajuwon and Dan Majerle posters hanging on my wall, where they have been since 1996/97. Badly sunfaded and with thumbtack holes....what can I say, I was a kid?

In SLU's 6th year, Kenner teamed up with Topps to produce the cards- and not only did you get one, you got two! One using the 1992-93 Topps design, one using the 1992-93 Stadium Club design! Although this was before I began collecting them, I was able to find more of these than the previous years.

The second USA Basketball team of the pro era was in 1994, for the Tournament of the Americas, but the team put together did not have the star power that the 1992 Olympic team had. The second team, however, got a set from three of the four card companies producing NBA cards at that time, and this Flair set was Fleer's contribution, It also included the Women's team, which is where this card is from. I have the least of this set than any of the other USA Basketball sets issued between 1992-2000.

The Skybox set seems like one I don't have much of, but it turned out that I now need only one card to complete it.

Complete! I originally didn't count the USA Basketball or Starting Lineup cards as part of my NBA collection. I considered them their own collections, just like I consider my NBA collection different from my college collection or NASCAR collection. When I was starting to get the bug back for collecting the NBA, in 2011, I decided to integrate the USAB and SLU sets into my collection proper. When I did that, I discovered that I had completed the 1994 Upper Deck USA set entirely through repacks sometime between 1996 and 2006!

I'm actually second-guessing myself on including these with my NBA collection now...I'm actually wondering if I should have counted these as part of my Olympic collection.

Complete! Collector's Choice debuted as a low-end set from Upper Deck, at 420 cards. The design was basic and the stats were truncated. but it's a decent enough design that mostly lets the photo do the talking. It would have been a lot better without the generic logo in the bottom corner of the card.

This was the first set with a Level 2 parallel. The Silver Signature cards were one per pack, but the Gold Signature fell one per BOX, much rarer. Over time, the parallels would increase in number and rarity, and now they have sets with multiple levels of parallels.

The E-Series debuted in 1994-95, and would run for many years afterwords, usually with a slightly different name. E-Motion was first, then came E-XL, EX-2000, EX-2001, EX-Century and finally just E-X. But it all started here. I really liked this set for a long time, but now I'm not really that big a fan of it. And some of the emotions they chose are not emotions at all. Thorough is not an emotion!

The second year of Finest was the first with those awful peel off things. They were totally unneeded, if you cared enough about your cards to not treat them like garbage they don't scratch any more than a regular card. These covers were used from 1994-95 through 1999-00. Ideally I would like to have two copies, one peeled and one unpeeled, but Finests are a little pricey and there's still a bunch I don't have a single copy of, let alone two!