For basketball, this story doesn't start with too many cards. It starts with almost none.
Basketball cards actually had a good run going once — Topps put out a set every season from 1969-70 through 1981-82, thirteen years straight, right through Larry Bird and Magic Johnson walking into the league in 1979. Then, for no reason Topps ever bothered to explain, they just stopped. No basketball cards in packs at all for four straight years. Fleer picked up the exclusive NBA license in 1985 and filled that silence with the now-iconic 1986-87 set — 132 cards in wax packs for fifty cents — and it flopped hard enough that Fleer reportedly cut its print order in half the very next year and still had trouble moving the cases. For a minute, it looked like basketball cards might go right back to sleep.
They didn't. They went the other way entirely.
The gold rush
Fleer held that NBA license alone for three seasons. Then, in 1989-90, the league broke its own exclusivity and licensed a second manufacturer: a brand called Hoops, owned by NBA Properties itself and manufactured, of all things, by Cardco Inc., a subsidiary of the tobacco company Liggett Group. That mattered more than it sounds: Liggett's distribution network already reached something like a quarter-million retail outlets nationwide. Basketball cards weren't just showing up at the card shop anymore. They were on the rack next to the gum and the lighters at every gas station and grocery store in the country.
Then the door blew wide open. SkyBox joined the race for 1990-91, Upper Deck followed for 1991-92 with hologram anti-counterfeit stamps on every card and a premium feel nobody in basketball had tried before, and Topps — which had walked away from the sport a decade earlier — forced its way back in for 1992-93. In the span of three seasons, the NBA went from one licensed manufacturer to five, none of them exclusive. Everybody could print, so everybody did.
The flood
This is the part of the story the hobby still hasn't fully forgiven: the companies kept printing like the demand would never end. Millions of copies of the same base card, case after case, year after year, on the assumption that a growing hobby could absorb infinite supply. It couldn't. Warehouses filled up. Shops that had been moving product a year earlier were suddenly sitting on boxes nobody wanted at any price. A stack of 1990-91 commons that felt like an investment in 1991 was quarter-bin filler by 1994 — sheer volume had done what nothing else could: made a basketball card worth less than the cardboard it was printed on.
The wreckage upstream
The overproduction wasn't just a shelf problem — it broke companies. Marvel Entertainment, flush with comic-book money, bought Fleer outright in 1992 for a reported $540 million, then came back in 1995 and bought SkyBox too, for around $150 million, folding both into a combined Fleer/SkyBox International that suddenly held major licenses across the NBA, NFL, NHL, MLB, and NASCAR in one shop. On paper it looked like an empire. In practice, it was a company built at the top of a market that was already collapsing under its own print runs — and Marvel itself filed for bankruptcy in 1996 with Fleer/SkyBox tangled up in it. By 1999, Marvel sold the whole card operation off for a reported $26 million — a fraction of what it had paid for Fleer alone seven years earlier — to a partnership backed by the Grass family, founders of Rite Aid. That's the junk wax era in one transaction: a five-hundred-million-dollar card company, sold for pennies on the dollar, because nobody could give the cardboard away.
Getting out from under it
The hobby didn't fix itself overnight, but you can point to the moment it started climbing out. A rookie named Kobe Bryant landed in 1996 and gave the market a reason to care about a specific card again instead of a whole case of them. And manufacturers finally learned the lesson the junk wax years had beaten into them: scarcity, not volume, is what makes cardboard worth chasing. Low serial numbers, game-used memorabilia swatches, on-card autographs — the insert-driven, hit-chasing hobby you know today was basically built in direct reaction to warehouses full of unsellable base cards from a few years earlier.
It's worth remembering, next time you flip past a stack of "beat up nothing" commons in a dollar box — that's not junk because nobody loved basketball cards in 1990. It's junk because everybody did, all at once, and the printing presses never got the memo to stop.
Sources: Post War Cards, PSA, Beckett, Sports Collectors Daily, Cardboard Connection, Trading Card Database, Sports Collectors Digest, Topps Ripped, Wikipedia (Fleer, Marvel Entertainment).