1996-97 Bowman's Best Basketball Forum

This may have been mentioned at some point before, but the 1996-97 Bowman's Best Set has the Rookie Cards and a "subset" in the base checklist that do not share the same numbering as the base cards.

Is there a reason the Rookies and the "Retro" cards are not listed as inserts?

According to this the set was intentially released that way. Two subsets (rookies and retro) combine wit hthe "normal" base set to make up the full base set.

https://www.cardboardconnection.com/1996-bowmans-basketball-cards

Thanks for the information.  I always just figured they were entered incorrectly.  Curious decison for them to release the set in this manner.

By having the different numbering they ARE inserts, regardless of how they are listed anywhere. 

The article is incorrect in stating they were the first Atomic Refractors seen in basketball- the extremely hard to find Atomic Refractor parallel in Topps Stars had come out earlier. In 23 years of chasing that set I've only been able to hunt down one of them- a Magic Johnson that I actually managed to get in 1996 or 1997, when the set was new...unfortunately predates when I began to track dates of addition, but I digress. 

Hey Billy, are those Topps Stars Atomic Refractors really that rare?  I have a Kevin McHale that I have had in my collection since I was a kid.  It was one of the cards I made sure to keep around with me when I wasn't actively collecting so must have been a good decision.

Well, I've been actively looking for them and can't find any more...at least in the price range I want to pay. COMC does have a bunch of them but the cheapest is currently $5. I have to be honest, I have not thought to check COMC before today, so they may not be as hard to find now as they were when I was looking hardest in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Back to the oringal question though. I've been poking around and everything I have seen so far says that the base set is 125 cards consisting of those 3 subsets. Regardless of how they are numbered, if the manufacturer released them with a specific numbering scheme and intent should we not keep it that way here? There is already a release note on this set. That's just my 2 cents though.

My take is that since they start over with #1 (with letters before it) they are an insert. A continually numbered yet lettered subset would be considered part of the base set, like for example 1995-96 Stadium Club which threw an E before the expansion teams, or 1981-82 Topps in either NBA or NHL which has regional numbering. 

I also think it's kind of funny that they named the Retro set Retro yet the numbering is TB, which presumably stands for Throw Back.