Collect call: 2009-10 Panini Certified basketball

Posted Feb 20, 2010 by Bob D'Angelo

Updated Feb 20, 2010 at 06:13 PM

Panini keeps churning out some nice basketball product. The company’s latest offering, 2009-10 Certified, continues that impressive trend.

The base cards have lots of foil around the edges (handle them carefully, they ding easily), but what is impressive is the sharpness of the main subject photography. The players literally leap off the card at you, and the detail is excellent.

The faux audience shots in black and white may be a bit forced, but the fact that it is not color does not bury the player into a sea of blinding colors. Plus, Panini did not use the same stock shot for every card, so at least there is some variety.

A hobby box contains 10 packs, with five cards to a pack. There are 150 cards in the base set, and the box I sampled had 44 of them. Card Nos. 151-170 designated as Immortals. The hobby box I saw had one such card, James Worthy, numbered to 500.

Cards numbered from 171 to 200 are part of the Freshman Fabrics Signature subset. Lots more foil than on the base cards, and basically head shots of the players.

In the hobby box I opened, the first such card was a Jrue Holiday card that contained an on-sticker autograph and a red game-used swatch. The certified logo that is on the bottom of every card is stamped in blue, and the card itself is numbered to 50.

The second rookie was Austin Daye, a green parallel card with an on-sticker auto and a three-color game-used swatch. The card is numbered 2/5.

The other two hits to the box were game-used cards — a Fabric of the Game, black-swatch card of Al Horford numbered to 250, and a blue parallel card of Andrei Kirilenko numbered to 50.

That’s four hits out of 10 packs, the average Panini promises. The odds are pretty good.

Other insert subsets include Certified Champions, Certified Imports and Gold Team.

Luckier collectors will pull the Shirt Off My Back Combos, or an auto or relic card of NBA greats like Bill Russell, Jerry West, John Havlicek, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Oscar Robertson or Magic Johnson.

Panini started its basketball product on a high note, and it continues to keep the bar set high. Certified is proof of that.