Trail Blazers Virtual Cards

The team's own custom cards, if you will. 

To celebrate their 50th anniversary, the Portland Trail Blazers planned a series of "Decades Nights" throughout the season, to honor some of the top players from the team from each decade. Fans are allowed to vote on a "team" of the decade among a pre-selected grouping of players, and the games themselves have been pretty fun. I went to the '90s night late last month and will be going to Sunday night's 2000s night. Part of the voting process is selecting from a sort of a rolodex wheel of Blazers players each represented on what totally looks like a basketball card that's probably supposed to be era appropriate.

Well, first off, let me say that I immediately regret not saving some of the images from the previous rounds of voting before they were lost to the sands of time (thanks, new internet!) I'll try to illustrate my point with what little I have to work with here.

⭐Introducing your 1970s Decade Team ⭐

Thanks for participating in our decade team voting presented by @toyota & @SpiritMTNcasino. Voting for the 1980s team will begin soon! pic.twitter.com/KTQeUYv9NZ

— Portland Trail Blazers (@trailblazers) November 2, 2019

First off (sorry, it's a Twitter video), we start off with a '70s Topps design for the 1970s team. This is the 1973-74 Topps only with a black background/border instead of white. I seem to remember these actually being white when I first saw them, but this was back in October and I'm probably just wrong.

For the '80s team, the Blazers mocked up cards in the iconic 1990-91 SkyBox design. These kind of looked era appropriate, but we all know that this set is... well... just after the '80s expired. This was also the first indication that the voting for any given player was confined to a single decade, so no Porter, Drexler or Kersey in the '80s set even though their exclusion was kind of distracting considering the card design that was being used. They would be held over for the '90s set.

Here's where Clyde and those guys ended up.

See, it's the 1991-92 SkyBox set. I think they did a good job with it, all things considered.

At this point, I was highly interested in seeing what they would use for the 2000s. Are there any memorable card designs from that decade that some Blazers intern could use to whip up some quick player "cards"? I had my doubts, and here's what they turned out.

Unless I'm missing something, it looks like they went super generic here, and just went heavy on the dreaded silver accents in their uniform design from the era (which they have finally deemphasized.) This feels like a letdown and also is pretty much what I expected.

I wonder if B-Roy will finally make his return to the Rose Garden on Sunday (doubtful.)

I'm expecting the next (and final) round of voting to be based on the overall look and feel of their website and social media accounts, but we'll see.

UPDATE - per request from Chris, The Collector, I dug up one more of the videos. I couldn't find one for the '90s team, however. Enjoy!

⭐Introducing your 1980s Decade Team ⭐

Thanks for participating in our decade team voting presented by @toyota & @SpiritMTNcasino. Keep an eye out for 90s voting coming soon! pic.twitter.com/04jC9me3jk

— Portland Trail Blazers (@trailblazers) December 20, 2019

UPDATE 02/23/2020 - here's the 2000's Team.

⭐Introducing your 2000s Decade Team ⭐

Thanks for participating in our decade team voting presented by @toyota & @SpiritMTNcasino! pic.twitter.com/ObDKji8nqj

— Portland Trail Blazers (@trailblazers) February 23, 2020