Bootleggin' with Panini

1991 Donruss is back from the dead... in basketball form. 

 

Similar to Topps Now, Panini has an online-only product that's printed on demand. I feel like it gets very little attention, although I'm not sure how much it deserves it. For the past few years (at least), they've produced an NBA set of rookies featuring an old Donruss baseball design complete with the iconic Rated Rookie logo. It looks wack, to fit with the vernacular of the early '90s.

The Blazers have had a rough season to say the least, but I decided to pick up Greg Brown's card from this set more as a curiosity than anything else. Brown is an immensely talented dunker, but is very young and hasn't had a ton of meaningful minutes to show whether he has a future as a rotation player. He seems like a cool dude, though, and I hope he ends up carving out a space for himself on the roster somehow.

The 1991 Donruss baseball set featured several different patterns using the same blue border in Series 1, but based on the two cards I purchased, I'm guessing that these all use the same pattern. In any case, the border isn't really the problem. The font is what's really tough to look at. I don't even know what to say about it.

I added Chris Duarte's card to my order as he's a Ducks alum. He came into the league as an older, readymade NBA rotation guy and has performed pretty well for the Pacers when's he's been on the floor. When you look at the back of the card, you can see that Panini abandoned the 1991 Donruss format entirely, and just did the Panini thing where you take the headshot portion of the photo and reproduce it on the back. Each card contains the print run of the set on the back, which is actually a bit of an improvement over how Topps expects you to just Google their print runs for the Topps Now line. Other than that, I can't really say that there's anything else that puts these cards above the Topps offering, but I am glad that I purchased these bits of weirdness for my collection.