NHL Draft Full of Hidden Gems—and Memorabilia Gold
For Paul Zickler, every major NHL event—including Wednesday night’s draft—is also something of a secondhand shopping spree. As Upper Deck’s senior brand manager for sports, Zickler’s responsibilities include overseeing which pieces of memorabilia will be sliced and served in future sports cards. And as the market demand for game-used items and other rare inserts has increased, Zickler has had to get creative.
Upper Deck released the first jersey cards in 1996, though the patches only appeared in one out of every 2,500 packs. Today, threads are much more common, as manufacturers look to other so-called relics to trigger collector cravings—stick shards, game-used pucks, net cords and so on. The ideas don’t stop there.
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Zickler has attempted to put game-used ice into a card, brought in special vendors to wrangle sideboard plexiglass into the right shape for inserts and even nabbed mascot jerseys for possible inclusion. “There’s nothing that I’m not at least going to entertain that we can put in the card,” he said.
League events often provide the best opportunity for those unique finds. After Ducks center Trevor Zegras went full Vince Vaughn during the 2022 All-Star Breakaway Challenge, NHL offered Upper Deck the dodgeballs used in the performance as part of their game-used rights. UD didn’t say no.
Following past drafts, Upper Deck has collected everything from venue signage to commissioner Gary Bettman’s microphone. (“The challenge is just cutting it up,” Zickler said.) Most of those items are discussed ahead of time, Dave McCarthy, the NHL’s VP for consumer products said—but every once in a while someone on either side of the relationship will spot a potential offering in real time. Zickler never stops looking. Upper Deck explores third party options too, scouring auction sites and vintage resellers for assets like tickets to historic games. Other times, NHL chief brand officer Brian Jennings pointed out, the league has to weigh whether an item is of so much interest that it actually belongs in the sport’s Hall of Fame.
The imperative to get creative picked up during the COVID-19 pandemic, as fans hungered for ways to feel connected to the action, even if those connections came in the form of cardboard. No fans were able to slap the glass at the 2021 Lake Tahoe game, for example, but a few lucky collectors can now own a slice of it.
As the world goes increasingly digital, the idea of owning a photo of someone could lose some luster, but possessing a physical token of their success is likely to only become more prized—and increasingly difficult to get, as elements of the pastime itself become virtual.
“Back in the day, we would manually create a player nameplate to accompany the team logo based on the team’s draft selection … and those nameplates, of course, were highly, highly coveted,” McCarthy said. “Now, as we morphed into more of a digital presentation, of course those nameplates have gone the way of the dodo bird. So with that, Upper Deck has had to be creative.”
This year, the collectible hawks will be even more alert, given the hype around presumptive No. 1 pick Connor Bedard. Cards featuring him in a Team Canada jersey are already selling for thousands.
As collecting has experienced a modern renaissance, it has become more deeply ingrained in the action itself. This year, Fanatics added a special rookie debut patch to MLB jerseys solely for the purpose of later putting those swatches in cards. In Upper Deck’s case, it isn’t just collecting material from this week’s NHL Draft; it’s the title sponsor for a second straight year. The walls between action, fandom and collecting are all falling.
That’s what makes the realness of fabric, rubber, wood or plexiglass relics so enticing. Microphone foam too, if Upper Deck could just figure out how to cut and encase it.
The NHL has looked to create future would-be collector items at the draft, like pieces of team identification at each draft table, “but when they are forced, they don’t work as well,” McCarthy said. “When it’s natural and native to the event, that’s what fans see, that’s what they remember, that’s what they look for.”
And so that’s what Zickler looks for too.
The goal is to give fans something they’ve never seen before, sourced from the events they’ve been watching forever. “If anyone has any unique ideas out there,” Zickler said at the end of the call, “Please let us know.”
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