1972-73 O Pee Chee Hockey Award Cards

Cleaning Out the Closet: 

Part 3 - Abandoned Projects

Once again I find myself unable to post to this blog in a timely manner. So here are some more abandoned projects from the closet.

This one is a bit different. I made these and planned to use them individually but just got bored with the whole idea. So I'm dumping them all at once. It is similar to my take on the 1972 Topps award cards. I simply replaced the photo of the award with a photo of the award winner. 

So here are the cards I made but hadn't published yet:

 

I had already posted these 2 cards in earlier posts:

And here are the original cards from that set. As you can see there was no room for the player's name so I offset the photo similar to the regular issue cards of that year:

Boring, right? Aren't you glad I didn't drag this out over 5 more posts?

1972-73 Topps Calder Trophy - Ken Dryden

I can think of no player in any major sport to win the post-season MVP award one year, then win Rookie of the Year honors the following year. But that is exactly the case with Ken Dryden.

Ken Dryden won the Conn Smythe Trophy in 1971. He was the goaltender for the Canadiens that held off my beloved Blackhawks in 7 games to win the Cup. But with only 6 regular season games he was still eligible for NHL Rookie of the Year honors in the 1971-72 season. Under the new coach Scotty Bowman, Dryden and the Canadiens improved from 97 points in 1970-71 to 108 point in 1971-72 earning Dryden the Calder Trophy. Over his career, Dryden would go on to win 5 Vezina Trophies as the league's top goalie. He was elected to the NHL Hall of Fame in 1983 and served in the Canadian Parliament from 2004-2011.

The actual 1972-73 Topps Calder Trophy card depicted the trophy itself. Although it is a very nice looking trophy, I think most collectors would prefer a card of the award winner.

1972-73 Topps Conn Smythe Trophy - Bobby Orr

In the 1972-73 hockey set Topps made cards of the trophies rather than the trophy winners. This is similar to what they did in their 1972 baseball set. A while back I updated those cards to make them more appealing to me. Now I am giving the same treatment to the hockey cards. 

The Conn Smythe Trophy is given to the MVP of the Stanley Cup playoffs. In 1972 it was awarded to Bobby Orr of the Boston Bruins. Orr actually accumulated quite a bit of hardware for his 1971-72 efforts, but more on that later. The card itself originally looked like this:

I modified it a bit to include the player's name while trying to be consistent with the set. Here is Bobby Orr's base card from that set:

2013 Stanley Cup Champs Chicago Blackhawks

A 1972-73 Topps Style card in honor of one of the greatest hockey teams in NHL history.