Hockey is almost upon us in the eTopps world. In the regular world we are well into the season and almost at the halfway mark. We all love how hockey and basketball run so late into the sunny summers. It is not that we don't love it -- it is just the seasons really don't gel with the seasons of our earth, the big ball we live on. Now what I would like to do is take a historical look at hockey's eTopps performance and take a look at what we could expect to see from hockey this year. I will also discuss the top players and, finally, I will list the cards I would include in the set if I were eTopps.

First off, let's talk about the 2002 set and what we can expect of it. There is not an issue discussing the 2001 set. The 2001 set needs no help or hype. It is surviving fine on it's own. The 2002 set started off fairly well last year, comparatively speaking. However, it then took the plunge, along with the rest of the eTopps market, starting in March 2003. The set hit rock bottom around the second week of December and since then has been slowly climbing back. The set right now is averaging $194, which is about a 40% reduction from the base price that all the cards were offered at. The future for the '02 set looks promising, being that the set is chock-full of good rookies and some stars in limbo (Heatley). The 11 rookies in the 2002 set have performed below expectations; only Jason Spezza is currently selling above his initial IPO price. However, Rick Nash has seen considerable trading as of late and is performing well on the ice also. The SP from this set, Michael Peca, is selling for a very reasonable $9.27 and is the third-lowest-priced SP card for any set (2002 football and baseball being a little less expensive). The future of the 2002 set hinges on these 11 rookies and the low print runs for some of the bigger stars. If this set has lower print runs than the 2003 set expect to see significant gains (10-20%) across the board.

As the 2003 set sits in a warehouse waiting for the IPO season to open we are all scratching our heads to try and figure out who is going to be in this set and who should be included. Should we do some vote-in's for hockey, like we started with baseball and football? Should we give the fans a chance to vote for their favorite player? I think so. If you'll remember from 2002, we did this and it was very popular with fans and collectors who spoke out on the boards. Right now, we can expect to see 8 weeks of hockey IPO's once they start. The set size went from 35 to 56 last year and should range from 54 to 60 cards this year. With that in mind, I think we should expect to see our regular stars: Yzerman, Federov, Hull, Forsberg, Lindstrom and plenty of others. We should also expect a good mix of rookies, defensemen, and goalies to complement our forwards (the "sunshine" or "Glory" boys).

What I've done is go through the entire first half of the season and select the players who have been performing best or excelling in a certain area so far. I took the top ten performing players at each position. Then, for the next five, I chose the most famous players who performed the best at their position. I then bounced that off who the fans voted their favorite in the All-Star balloting. I added any players in the top 5 vote-getters at each position whom I had left off. Then I checked each team to ensure they had at least one player representative. If a team did not have one from the two previous selections, I went to that team and selected the most popular and best-performing star I could. In some cases I added a player because he had broken a record or achieved a milestone. This was my first rule -- every team must have at least one representative in the set. I also came up with a second rule -- no team can have more than five players in the set (5% of the set was the maximum). Finally, I bounced it off whether they have had a card with eTopps before (this being the least important category). So what did all of that add up to? Here is the list of players that I, and only I, would have selected for the 2004 hockey set.

Remember this is not what is actually going to happen for the 2003 set. This is what I would choose if I were in the boardroom and asked to come up with a set for hockey this year. After about four hours of beating my brain and watching some football I made sense of it all and the puzzle came together. You'll notice there are 64 cards (8 cards a week for 8 weeks). Not a hard thing to accomplish… I also went back and added two cards of older players who have had great careers, Chelios and Francis. Maybe eTopps one day will pay me to set up their sets. Until then this is what I think would be their best bet at keeping our interest this year. We will see you all in one week.