1972-73 O-Pee-Chee Danny O’Shea #201 Bilingual Back St. Louis Blues

Description

1972-73 O-Pee-Chee Danny O'Shea #201 Bilingual Back St. Louis Blues Not every player takes the normal road, and Danny O'Shea's route to the NHL ran straight through Canada's national team at a time when that meant something different than it does today. This 1972-73 O-Pee-Chee card, number 201 from the slightly scarcer third series, shows a 6 foot 1 center from Toronto who skipped the usual minor league ladder by playing for Canada's national squad before joining the Minnesota North Stars, then moved through Chicago before landing in St. Louis at the end of the 1971-72 season. The payoff in St. Louis was a family reunion, because his brother Kevin O'Shea was already on the roster, and the back of the card makes a point of the brother combination along with a cartoon of the two of them. Danny scored three goals in 20 games for the Blues that spring and settled in as a checking center on a club that was still riding the momentum of three straight Stanley Cup Final appearances. He finished with 296 NHL games between Minnesota, Chicago and St. Louis, and his story is a good reminder that the 1970s game was full of players whose careers were built on roles rather than highlight reels. Card 201 comes from the third series of the 340 card 1972-73 O-Pee-Chee run, printed in Canada, and it is one of the tougher series to complete compared with the first two, which makes clean singles more useful than their price tags suggest. The reverse carries the full bilingual English and French biography and a complete career record, and it is a standard O-Pee-Chee bilingual back, not a puzzle back. The 1972-73 O-Pee-Chee Danny O'Shea #201 card is a sensible add for Blues team collectors and a low cost way to keep a set build moving. the green background is even and bright, the portrait is clean with no creasing, and the honest flaws are a soft top right corner, a touch of tan rubbing along the left edge and centering nearer 60/40 left to right with a slightly wide top margin. The bilingual back is clean and readable with no writing or tape, and it is not a puzzle back. Conservatively this is EX 5, with good color and a clean surface offset by the soft corner, the light edge rub and the off center cut, and there is no reason to suspect trimming, recoloring or any other alteration. Grade Estimate: EX 5