1975-76 Topps Basketball Cards

While featuring a font type and colors that certainly seemed to be solidly of their own time, 1975-'76 Topps might be among the cleanest designs of all the basketball sets the company ever produced. At 330 cards, it was also the largest basketball set ever produced until 1989.

The card fronts feature a player picture, with a team name above him and his name below. The only other thing that has been added is a series of two diagonal stripes in the upper right corner. The backs are unique because they have more filler than other sets do. They are dominated by a large bisected circle. The top half of the circle contains the player's name, team, position and vital stats. The lower half has a couple of bullet points, and sometimes a note about when the player was drafted. The card number appears in a green box in the upper left hand corner and drawn basketball characters surround the circle. At the bottom is a year-by-year statistics line, which the circle is modified to fit.

All-Star players are given a different design. Stars are placed inside the diagonal bars and a graphic pedestal surrounds their name at the bottom with the specific information about which team they played on. Again, they are not a separate subset, but sprinkled throughout as part of the regular cards. Again, the set is divided between NBA players (cards #1-220) and ABA players (cards #221-330). The cards were printed on three sheets, with 22 cards double-printed on the second printing sheet.

A first-time subset features team checklist cards. While many of the cards showed a simple assembly of all the players and coaches, some cards stand out. The Lakers team card features the floating heads of each member of the team, while the Supersonics are shown in front of an airplane.

There are a lot of subsets, which are once again broken up between the two leagues. They are: NBA Statistical Leaders (#1-6), NBA Team Leaders (#116-133), NBA Playoffs (#188-189), NBA Team Checklists (20-220), ABA Statistical Leaders (#221-226), ABA Team Leaders (#278-287), ABA Playoffs (#309-310) and ABA Team Checklists (321-330).

Moses Malone, Keith (Jamaal) Wilkes, Maurice Lucas and Bobby Jones are the key rookies. The end of the 1975-'76 basketball season saw several ABA teams disappear and others merged into the NBA, so this would be the final season the set basketball would be divided between the leagues.

Key 1975-76 Topps Basketball Cards:

• Moses Malone RC #254
• Julius Erving #300
• Kareem Abdul-Jabbar #90
• Bill Walton #77
• Pete Maravich #75

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1975-76 Topps Basketball Lot Of 37 ABDUL-JABBAR ERVING MALONE RUSSELL THURMOND $39.99

1975-76 Topps Basketball #1 Scoring Average Leaders MCADOO BARRY ABDUL-JABBAR $19.99

1975-76 Topps Basketball Card #219 SEATTLE SUPERSONICS CHECKLIST BILL RUSSELL $6.99

1975-76 Topps Basketball Card #286 UTAH STARS TEAM LEADERS MOSES MALONE HOF $9.99

153 Diff 1975 -76 Topps Basketball Barry Cowens Bing Unseld Hayes Frazier Lanier $99.99

29 1975-76 Topps Basketball # 1 Scoring Avg Leaders Abdul-Jabbar, Barry Cards $15.50

JULIUS ERVING 1975-76 Topps ABA 1st Team All-Star Basketball Nets $9.99

1975-76 TOPPS #302 MAURICE LUCAS SPIRITS ROOKIE NM 058664 $7.90