1972-73 O-Pee-Chee Jim Lorentz #116 Buffalo Sabres Center

Description

1972-73 O-Pee-Chee Jim Lorentz #116 Buffalo Sabres Center Jim Lorentz's 1972-73 O-Pee-Chee card shows the versatile center in his white Sabres jersey, a fitting image for a player whose career would eventually intersect with one of the strangest and most memorable moments in NHL history. Before arriving in Buffalo, Lorentz had already won a Stanley Cup with the Boston Bruins in 1970, and the card back notes his path through the Oklahoma City Blazers of the Central Hockey League before he broke into the NHL full-time. While this particular card predates his most famous moment, collectors and hockey historians universally associate Lorentz with the legendary "bat game" of January 21, 1975, when a bat began flying erratically above the ice at Buffalo Memorial Auditorium during a Sabres-Bruins contest and Lorentz swatted it out of the air with his stick mid-play, killing it instantly to a mix of horror and roaring laughter from the crowd. That single, bizarre highlight has made Lorentz a permanent fixture in hockey pop-culture trivia, and any card documenting his time in Buffalo carries a bit of that colorful legacy. On the ice, Lorentz was a steady, well-traveled forward who contributed reliable secondary scoring and penalty-killing depth to the Sabres throughout the early 1970s. The card's reverse, printed in the standard Canadian O-Pee-Chee bilingual English/French format, lays out his full career statistics and includes a small hand-drawn cartoon panel, both hallmarks of the set's charmingly modest production style. this card is confirmed to be a genuine bilingual O-Pee-Chee back and not a puzzle-back variety. On close visual inspection the card presents cleanly, with sharp corners showing only light handling wear, solid edges with no visible chipping, and centering that leans mildly off-center left-to-right but remains well within the normal range for this print run. The white jersey photography is clean and bright, and the orange border shows good, even color with no noticeable staining or fading. No creases or surface marks were detected in the available images. As always with raw vintage cardboard, we apply a conservative grading approach here, acknowledging that in-hand inspection may reveal additional wear not visible in scans. A fun, story-rich addition for any Buffalo Sabres or offbeat hockey-history collection. Grade Estimate: EX 5