Some good Hockey cards - '74-75 Topps Team Leaders

Since yesterday's post was needlessly depressing, here are a few old-school hockey cards that should brighten up your day.

These cards are from the 1974-1975 Topps set and are all Team Leader cards. The thing about Hockey leaders is that there are sow few quantifiable stats, that a lot of times the same guys lead in everything. As you can see here with the California Golden Seals card:

Goals leader, Joey Johnston. Assists leader, Joey Johnston. Points leader (points = goals + assists, so guess what), Joey Johnston. Scoring Percent leader, Walt McKechnie who I would bet money is actually Joey Johnston with a nose job.I don't quite understand why Topps chose those categories. Goals and assists, sure. Those are pretty much the only stats any casual fan knows about and even the assists one is somewhat obscure got people not familiar with hockey. Points and scoring % is kind of dumb though. They're likely to be the same people as the scoring and assists leaders. A better choice would have been penalty minutes and save percentage so you could at least get a picture of the goalie and a goon on the card. The layout person discovered this pretty quickly as you can see above and below.

Once again, we have one guy leading three of the categories while the fourth is led by a doppelganger. Punch Rene Robert in the face a couple of times and he's the spitting image of Richard Martin. You will notice that the harried soul in the art department didn't just cop out and use the same mugshot on all the photos though. Oh no, that would be lazy and unprofessional. It looks like they got the guy in a three for a quarter photo booth on both cards. Johnston seems a bit bewildered by it all while Martin has a little fun with it. Pretty much all the leaders cards are like this and to their credit they seem to have gotten different photos on all the ones I've seen. The leaders cards do capture the spirit of the franchise in many cases.

This is why people hate the Rangers. The rest of the set is mullettactic and these goobers have perfect hair. Plus Brad Park is apparently making bedroom eyes at the photographer's assistant. This card is creeping me out, lets get to the polar opposite of this card.

Oh dear God. No perfect hair here. At least Dave Schultz doesn't look anything like Bobby Clarke. Then again, I don't think anyone quite looks like Bobby Clarke. Clarke takes a photo on his good side, then tries one from the front which was a big mistake, and then goes back to his good side and leans over a bit for variety. Dave Schultz is wondering how the hell Brad Park made it worth that hot assistant.

These leader cards is one of the reasons why the '74-'75 set is one of my all time favorites. It's goofy, it's kinda cheap looking, but it's interesting. A hell of a lot more interesting than 762 cards that all look alike.