1972-73 O-Pee-Chee 2nd All-Star Team #250 Vic Hadfield Jean Ratelle Yvan Cournoyer NHL All-Stars

Description

1972-73 O-Pee-Chee 2nd All-Star Team #250 Vic Hadfield Jean Ratelle Yvan Cournoyer NHL All-Stars Pull in one of the most patriotic and bilingual All-Star cards OPC ever produced, this 1972-73 O-Pee-Chee #250 2nd All-Star Team single trading card from O-Pee-Chee's hockey series—one of the canonical League Stars cards of the early Seventies. Card 250 showcases the National Hockey League's best left-winger, centre, and right-winger for the 1972-73 season: Vic Hadfield of the New York Rangers at left wing, Jean Ratelle of the New York Rangers at centre, and Yvan Cournoyer of the Montreal Canadiens at right wing. This trio helped define the offensive power of the era—Ratelle famously went on to score 46 goals that season, Hadfield delivered 50, and Cournoyer was already a Stanley Cup champion demonstrating his killer instinct on the Montréal right side. The card's NPC layout embraces the iconic three-stack League-Leaders design: each photograph is presented in a black-barred mini-portrait with rank and team identifier on the left, and a slim yellow title strip across the very bottom. What is especially intriguing is that the 1972-73 O-Pee-Chee set used the same back design as their parent Topps-issued 1972-73 cards, providing a dual-season consistency that makes for genuinely vintage cardboard. O-Pee-Chee, the Canadian-imprint partner of Topps at the time, produced cards exclusively for the Canadian market, and this card's bilingual French (Joutes d'étoiles) and English (All-Star Game Statistics) panels make this among the most culturally distinct cards in the set. The back is the unmistakable Canadian O-Pee-Chee bilingual back, presenting the All-Star statistics in parallel English and French columns with header text in both languages, an OPC "ETOILES DE LA L. N. H." mark across the top, and the trademark red italic "O-Pee-Chee" wordmark and "PRINTED IN CANADA" stamp in the lower-left. the front corners show mild softness, more pronounced at upper-left where there is a small fibre lift but no break, with the upper-right and lower-left visibly crisper; the lower-right is also slightly soft. Centring on the front has a slight pull-right with the top margin a hair tight; back centring is near bullseye. Edges show very minor contact-dings, one at the upper-middle and one at the lower-middle, neither breaking the cardstock. No creases, no surface scratches, no wrinkles, no gloss-flip damage. Gloss is intact and lights return evenly across the laminate. Conservative grade: EX-MT 6, with NR-MT 7 plausibility if a lenient subgrade pattern applies. Grade Estimate: EX-MT 6