June 26, 1996. Continental Airlines Arena, East Rutherford, New Jersey. Nobody in that building walked out knowing they'd just watched the deepest draft class of the modern era get handed out one name at a time. They just knew the Sixers were on the clock, coming off an 18-64 season, and they needed a floor general badly enough to take a chance on an electric, undersized guard out of Georgetown.
They took Allen Iverson. It was the right call — and it was only the beginning.
The top of the board
Philadelphia went with Iverson first overall. Toronto, only in its second year of existence as a franchise, took Marcus Camby out of UMass at 2. Vancouver, just as new to the league, grabbed Shareef Abdur-Rahim out of Cal at 3. Straightforward enough so far — until pick 4 turned into one of the great "wait, what?" moments in draft history.
Milwaukee was on the clock at 4 and took Stephon Marbury. Minnesota, picking right behind them at 5, took Ray Allen. Then, less than half an hour later, the two teams swapped the rights outright — Marbury's going to Minnesota, Allen's going to Milwaukee along with a future first-round pick. Two future Hall-of-Fame-caliber careers, and neither man ended up playing a single game for the team that actually drafted him.
The guy who fell — and the guys who fell further
Here's the part every collector already knows in their bones: Kobe Bryant went 13th. Thirteen. The Charlotte Hornets took him straight out of Lower Merion High School, then flipped him to the Lakers for Vlade Divac in a deal that couldn't even become official until the July moratorium lifted — Divac didn't want to leave L.A. and it took two and a half weeks of arm-twisting before he agreed to report to Charlotte.
Twelve players came off the board before him. One of them, Todd Fuller, went 11th overall — two picks ahead of a player who'd retire with five championships. Steve Nash didn't get picked until 15, to a Phoenix team that would eventually build two MVP seasons around him. Peja Stojaković went 14th and didn't even join the NBA for two more years, still playing professionally in Greece. And Jermaine O'Neal, another high schooler taken at 17, wouldn't become an All-Star until years after Portland's bench had mostly forgotten they had him.
Then there's Ben Wallace, who isn't on this list at all — he went completely undrafted in 1996, signed as an afterthought, and became a four-time Defensive Player of the Year and a Hall of Famer anyway. No card company printed him a rookie card that year worth chasing. Nobody printed him much of anything.
The rookie season itself
Iverson took Rookie of the Year for the 1996-97 season, averaging 23.5 points, 7.5 assists, and 2.1 steals a game — and he needed every bit of that stat line, because Marbury wasn't far behind in the voting, 44 first-place votes to 35. Camby made the All-Rookie First Team as a rim-protecting big for a young Raptors squad. Kobe, still coming off the bench in L.A. behind a veteran wing rotation, flashed the talent in bursts without yet being the number one option — that would come soon enough.
What it added up to
Five Naismith Hall of Famers walked out of this single draft: Iverson, Ray Allen, Kobe Bryant, Steve Nash, and Ben Wallace. Three of them — Bryant, Iverson, and Nash — went on to combine for four regular-season MVP awards. Add Abdur-Rahim, Ilgauskas, Marbury, O'Neal, Stojaković, and Walker, and the class produced eleven career All-Stars in total, drafted and undrafted combined. Nearly a third of one first round turned into players good enough to make an All-Star team at least once — a hit rate almost no other draft class has matched since.
For a collector, that's the whole appeal of a rookie card in one sentence: you're not betting on a stat line, you're betting on which name in that stack of twenty-nine turns out to matter in twenty years. In 1996, the honest answer was almost all of them.
Sources: Basketball-Reference, Wikipedia (1996 NBA draft), NBA.com, CBS Sports, Sports Collectors Daily, Sportskeeda, Basketball Network.