To Billy Celio, producing a centennial trading card set for the Detroit Red Wings wasn’t so much business as usual. It was a passion project. A labor of love.
“I’ve been circling this year on my calendar for quite some time, and I was pretty excited,” Celio said.
Celio isn’t merely the Senior Product Manager at Upper Deck. He’s also an avid Red Wings fan.
“I’m born and raised in East Lansing, so I definitely jumped at the opportunity to be able to work on this set and am very excited about it,” Celio said.
Once he got over the euphoria of the opportunity, Celio began to grapple with the enormous responsibility it entailed. How do you narrow 100 years of Red Wings hockey into a 100-card base set?
Some hard choices and some tough cuts would need to be made.
“Obviously, when you’re dealing with 100 years, making decisions on who goes in and who gets left out, it’s got to be one of the biggest challenges,” Celio said.
The league was presented with 130 names, and then the whittling began.
Two Versions Of Centennial Set
Upper Deck is producing two versions of the Red Wings Centennial Set. The retail set, which was released last week, is a standard base set.
“It’s just really cool to get a set of cards out to the public that they can be like, ‘Oh, this is my set,’” Celio said. “You can put it in your binders, you can put it in a box, and just kind of go through and look at the history.
“There are possibilities of getting autographs. And there’s a cool insert that reminds us of the 1996-97 team that won the Cup, which we waited quite some time to win one.”
Plenty Of Unique Red Wings Features Included
The hobby set, which will be released at a still-to-be-determined later date, is targeted at hard-core collectors. It’s chock full of unique Red Wings-related bells and whistles.
“We have pieces of memorabilia from Olympia Stadium and Joe Louis Arena,” Celio said. “We have old ticket stubs from both places.
“It’s going to be a really fun product. You get two autographs a box in the hobby set.”
Among the autographs that Upper Deck is including with the hobby set are Gordie Howe, Alex Delvecchio, Terry Sawchuk, and Bob Probert. You’ll also find signed cards from plenty of current Red Wings, such as Patrick Kane, Simon Edvinsson, and Marco Kasper.
“We have a number of autographs again of guys that you just haven’t seen on signed cards in a while,” Celio said.
That latter group features such players as Martin Lapointe, Rogatien Vachon, Vaclav Nedomansky, Ray Whitney, Pete Stemkowski, and Reed Larson.