welcome back loyal listeners of the stacking slabs podcast network two season five episode nine of the wnba card podcast my name is caitlin i go coldlunchcards mostly on the instagram machine but you can find me other places as well like twitter and discord and all those other apps that we talk cards about today i'm excited to be talking cards talking about wnba cards with an amazing person that i met via instagram speaking of him i'm joined today by josh he goes by lovedudubs on instagram and we're gonna be talking all about the chicago sky last week we talked with carter about the las vegas aces today is the sky and we've got a bunch of other collector conversations lined up to kind of round out this season of the wnba card podcast which has been focused entirely on team collecting and what it means to be a team collector so today josh i'm excited to have you here to talk about a team that's kind of south of me i guess a team that i pay a lot of attention to but before we get into it if people don't know who you are do you mind introducing yourself kind of who you are where they can find you and and what you do yeah for sure my name is josh i am in chicago illinois my collecting handle for instagram is luvdads it's l u v d a d u b s i work in the hospitality industry i've been doing that most of my career i think that recently i'm in the restaurant side of it and i think that that improves my collecting and that we're always chasing accolades and awards and stuff like that in the restaurant industry and that keeps me doing the same thing when i'm when i'm collecting cards i'm always searching for that rare card or that hard to get card i love that we're gonna get into it because you've amassed a pretty significant wnba collection that when i stumbled upon your instagram page the first thing that i noticed was your bio it was interesting your bio is short but it's curated it says josh from the windy from the city of wind and then there's a list of players clemente hammerin' hank jackie kobe candace the ogunacay sisters camilla cardoso angel reese maddie westfeld don malanga hannah doggo now that's a pretty interesting list it spans two sports many leagues almost eighty years players who have been retired for decades and others who haven't even started their professional debut but all in one list why don't we kinda start with the instagram of it all the bio and let's start with the handle you mentioned it what does it mean and then why did you pick it so the love the dubs is my collecting handle my personal handle is a nod to bucky badger a longtime wisconsin resident and a university of wisconsin alumni so i wanted to give an ode that was along those lines but i didn't really just wanna use becky badger i found a really cool picture of her and she was wearing this w sweater and i've absolutely loved that old school w logo for the university of wisconsin that coupled with my love for the wnba i just kinda thought love the dubs was where it was gonna go the duh is kind of an ode to i live in the backyard of soldier field over here and while i'm not a bears fan i do have respect for that organization so it's kind of a tip of the cap to the coach ditka and those great snl skits with madison's own chris farley from back in the day that's a i did not know that story behind it i love that and also we can claim butt kiss as well because i believe we have one hired on the green bay staff at the moment so i think we can take that as fans and not have to be completely yeah we can't be completely talking about the bears here otherwise i'm gonna get distracted but let's go back to that list that i mentioned how did you decide who kind of like made that intro you know when we talk about the instagram hobby community it's where we meet a lot of people and it says a lot about you when you open up an instagram and you see that list of what people collect kinda what kinda makes what what kind of inspired that that bio for sure i collected a lot as a kid and most of that was baseball cards because baseball was my true love and going to card shows was something that i could do with my dad so for you know a ten year stretch of my childhood i was a huge baseball card collector and i remember all those players that my dad said he had cards of when he was a kid and i always wanted to get those cards but as a child i could never never afford them they were unattainable then i stopped collecting through the early part of my adulthood in twenty six i started to look around at getting back into collecting and when i was doing it you know i was finally an adult with with a bank account and had money and could afford these things i was looking at all those players that i wanted as a kid the roberto clemente the hank aaron the jackie robinson cards that my dad had told me he had that no longer had i just wanted to get those cards to feel like what he was feeling when he was a kid and to pay honor to these great all time legends of the game so i started buying a lot of these old school baseball players and then my love for kobe bryant kinda spilled into it and i started spending more and more money on that i remembered back to how much i enjoyed watching candace parker play when she was in tennessee it was one of the few games that i think you could even see women's basketball back in the day because pat summitt was such a legend and they would show her but i saw it and as a chicagoan i felt a sense of pride with her because she's from a nearby suburb so i started to look around see what i could find for her stuff and in twenty nineteen i started to buy my first wnba card since that point while i still dabble in other sports and it's not my collection's not isolated just baseball or women's basketball by any means it's all over but for space constraints i think i could only put those eight or nine players on there because where the vast majority of my focus is nowadays but you know i started dabbling in wnba in twenty nineteen twenty twenty and by twenty twenty one it's truly all that i purchase anymore is women's basketball there might be a few cards here there that i buy that are outside of the wnba or college women's but mostly it's women's basketball at this point gotcha do you kinda consider the women's basketball collection and then say some of those like more vintage basketball or even kobe do you do you consider those two different collections and and one of them is kind of complete and the other one's in progress or is this kind of all one project that you're working on yeah i feel like the only way that i could even view it is as a large hole because i don't know if i tried to put individual aisles on each one i think they're gonna crisscross one another at some point anyway and to say that things are complete is crazy with me too because i start checklist and they're always evolving and as i get close to finishing them something comes up and now there's more things to do so you know that that's really tough for me i i i can't stay in one lane and say that i have you know like individual collections i think i just look at it all as a whole which is chaos that's like the one thing that i think of when i think of my collection is just utter chaos and something could happen later tonight that will spark something in me and i'll start going a different way with it like a incomplete checklist is one thing i have just piles and piles of them and i get so close to collecting all of a set or all of something and then it's on to something else and i have all these other projects i need to fulfill at some point in time right i feel like you and i kinda have that in common where like there's just a lot of different lanes happening in parallel and you know obviously one of them is that we have in common is the wnba but we just have an appreciation for cards themselves and for sports themselves so i guess i kinda wanna talk to you about the chicago of it all because chicago is a sports city as much as i you know have my biases as a green bay packer fan and and you're also a packer fan but you're living in chicago right where does kind of the chicago sky fit in the picture of chicago sports how how how does this kind of rank up compared to maybe some of your other allegiances as a as a sports fan yeah for sure i mean i'm huge sports fan and i think you you can see it by looking at my bio and seeing the pictures of all of the places that i go i don't just collect sports cards i i i like to tell people that i collect stadiums you know i try to go to as many different stadiums of in many different sports as i can and i've been doing that all my life and i moved to chicago twenty five years ago now and when i first moved here being an avid sports fan as i am i knew i had to find someone to root for here i couldn't move to chicago and not be a fan of one of these sports teams i would go crazy the accessibility alone is so much that but i moved here lived right by wrigley field and i have not liked the chicago cubs most of my life and then living by wrigley field has only furthered my dislike for them so it kinda naturally just was like okay i'm gonna root for the chicago white sox that makes sense i love the game of baseball i kind of just detested this side of town let me take on this side of town but i didn't grow up a chicago white sox fan so it was something that i was just trying to adopt and i was a longtime baseball fan rooting for all these different organizations it just didn't feel right for me i needed something chicago that was that was really new to me and i had never chosen a wnba team i had liked watching sparks games because i like candace parker and i liked nyaka but i never really full on rooted for the sparks and then in twenty twenty once we started to see some more games televised because they were in the bubble and there was nothing else for us to have on tv thankfully i got a chance to watch more sky games than i ever had in the time that i lived in chicago like you know the cw would put one or two games on during a year but you could never watch more than five games in a season and that gay that season in the bubble i was fully like introduced to sky basketball and i immediately fell in love with it this was a team that had played in the suburbs and i knew that they had moved to chicago recently so i was like okay i can get to these games i looked they were incredibly affordable so in twenty twenty one when the bubble had broken and we resumed we signed candace parker my my love for the wnba and and the chicago sky was fully in place then and i was like this is this is my chicago team you know i never had to worry about them stepping on the toes of another team from that sport so it's been sky from that point forward and it's only a five year fandom but i feel like i've been through a lot of ups and downs in those five years and continue to continue to do so on a game to game basis almost but yeah literally it's been a roller coaster down there in chicago and we'll get into kind of the current state and and the history of the chicago sky and all of that but i kinda wanna talk about how you translate your love for the game love for sports love for the wnba and love for the sky into card collecting so the first topic that i wanna talk to you about josh that's like super interesting is that your pc isn't just like you buy one card and then it enters the pc it you buy multiples of cards which is a interesting strategy that some people are gonna listen and it's gonna be like nails on a chalkboard and other people are gonna listen and they're gonna be like wow this is awesome like i wish i had ten copies or x copies of a certain card when i looked at your instagram i saw like fourteen sue bird rookie cards i saw thirteen camila cardozos twelve chinays on a post you made about a neca card neca autograph card you said quote print run of just thirty three and this is my fourth copy just twenty nine more to go now that to me is a lot of accumulation happening kinda let's start and work off that what's kind of the appeal of acquiring say the fifth copy of a card that you already own as opposed to just having one well i don't know if this is gonna really get to the root of the problem but the the intrigue of getting that fifth copy is that i can't get to thirty three until i get to five and beyond so i don't know what it is that's instilled in me that makes me want all of them you know and i i've tried to think about this for a while i've it's been brought to light a little bit recently i had to unload a storage unit within the last few weeks and i had a light of items in there that have been just in boxes for the vast majority of my adult life and i hadn't looked through and i found an old binder in there that was filled with will clark cards i was a will clark card back in the will clark fan back in the late eighties this binder was full front page to last page with nothing but nineteen eighty seven rookie cards between topps don russ fleer and a few random things but there were hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of will clark cards wow so it's clear that i have been doing this the vast majority of my life i don't know if it was something that's just been in the collecting aspect or what but as it is with this two birds and all that it was such a niche like hobby collecting wnba cards and while there was so much out there that i could buy because i was so new to the market and was trying to realize what had what was going on in the twenty five years of collecting wnba cards that i hadn't seen yet i picked out a very few select cards from the beginning like those sue bird rip cards i just thought were so cool because it's got an actual piece of the jersey she wore in the first ever game she played and you know i can go on and look and see that game and see her bio and be like oh this this is from a jersey where she had x amount of points and rebounds in her first game ever and it's so cool to me and especially in today's cards with panini and topps putting out stuff that aren't licensed pieces from jerseys that other than something someone maybe wore in the locker room for twenty minutes so to get a piece like that i thought it was well worth what i was spending on it and i would search for other cards i want and then continue to come across those cards at what i thought were very fair prices so i just kept buying them i didn't i didn't really think about it and then as i got to three or four of them i'm like okay i'm gonna start collecting different colors of these jerseys that i can find and now it's just come to whenever they pop up on ebay i'm pretty much one of the first people that sees it and fifty percent of the time i just buy it now so i love that i'm sorry for anyone i told someone in instagram feed that i was in the other day that was thinking about buying that that fear ripped card i told them they had about twenty four hours to make the purchase and after that that card wasn't gonna get out again that's hilarious when when we had season four of this podcast we did instead of team by team we did era by era and multiple people said that that sue bird ripped card was considered a mount rushmore card of wnba cards in general so it's a testament to your collecting and to kind of your taste that you picked up say twelve to fifteen of these and are still amassing them and to that end i kinda wanna ask you a a big question it's just gonna be hard to answer but kinda if you could try to explain what your approach to collecting wma cards is what kinda has to be true or not true i guess for a card to become part of your pc versus something that just stays on ebay and you let somebody else go for it yeah especially with where my collection is going now i'm i used to buy just everything whether it was a fifty cent card or a two dollar card five dollar card like my the first year runs the prison of chiray and yucca what i have in boxes here is offensive like but i don't know now like why i have all of those why do i need seventeen of the orange numbered to sixty five it just doesn't make as much sense to me anymore whereas i think about the money that i spent on those and the bigger cards that i could have bought so those are some of the things that i'm looking for now are those those bigger and and better cards something that define more of a collection it's con again it'll be hard for me to get rid of a lot of that stuff because i am a hoarder by nature but now when i'm looking for cards i i look for the low numbered stuff i want it to be of great players i i've gotten burned in prospecting a lot in the past on baseball players and even some in the wnba and i just try to move away from that a little bit i'm gonna continue to buy sky rookies just because i'm right across the street from their stadium and i'm gonna keep going to their games and rooting for them and they're relatively fairly inexpensive i guess sky players are except for angel but i judge everything against that twenty twelve yekka now if i'm looking at an asia gold then i'm considering whether or not i wanna spend two hundred and fifty dollars on it i think to myself would i just rather have another one of those super short print yaku cards or would i rather have this asia so that's where i'm kind of at now i'm looking for the lower print run of the greater players asia is obviously one that i'm buying a lot of at this point because i just don't understand why the everyone hasn't figured this out that she's the best player in the league's history but yeah i i don't really know if there is a defined path there it yeah i think i told you earlier when we were just chatting that chaos is one of the best like words to describe my collecting i yeah i don't know if while i'm searching stuff on ebay my ideas are going to change yeah fair enough fair enough it's funny because the the episode that came out before this which at the time of our recording hasn't quite come out yet we talk all about why hasn't the hobby caught up on asia wilson's greatness why hasn't the market recognized this and it sounds like we just keep repeating those same kind of mistakes as a market similar to say the the sue bird card we are talking about or neca who has a resume that just keeps going and going and going and seems to not not diminish at any rate and the same thing is happening for asia so it's really an interesting phenomenon that's happening in in the wnba space as say the rest of the lanes or categories of cards continue to skyrocket the wnba maybe isn't kind of skyrocketing at the same pace so we're kind of in an interesting spot right now we'll get more into market thoughts on you know pricing etcetera etcetera but i wanna zoom out for a second before we get into more about cards and ask you a question that i ask every guest on this season which is what does kind of being a fan of women's sports in general mean to you this is a big question so you know take that how you will i mean i know that it's cliche to say that it means the world to me but it really it really truly does i've been such an avid sport fan for my entire life and you know especially in today's society i feel like we see things being so fickle and whether or not we can control a lot of it but it's always one side versus the other and you always need to choose one lane or the other and there's never often a common ground and even in men's professional sports i find myself going to games and getting an argument it's like that are just completely meaningless and not to say it's the other person's fault it's often my fault because i'm a very passionate sports fan but there's something to be said about women's sports and specific the wnba that when you get in that building i just feel like you're you're amongst family the camaraderie that's been extended to me through the fan base and the league is second to none like the wnba makes a really great does a really great job in making this a very fan inclusive accessible event i i have met more wnba players just from hanging out postgame in the stadiums for fifteen minutes or walking the streets or and just seeing them and striking up a conversation and having that conversation last you know like ten fifteen minutes i can remember a conversation i had with with ally quigley once and she explained to me how she was so happy that there were fans like me out there at the wnba you know like a forty something year old white male that roots for the wnba so passionately and not only that but i would see her on such a consistent basis and i'm i'm an in person autograph hound so if i see someone especially living next door to the arena i i'm oftentimes i'm able to get their autograph but she told me she's like you know you're very respectful you've never once asked me for more than one autograph she's like we got people coming up to us that'll have sheets and ask us for five six a dozen autographs and you always ask for one and you start off our conversation the same time every time you ask me how i'm doing and you know stuff like that you you don't you don't see outside of women's sports and it's sad but i mean i can remember being a child and getting in an elevator with a incredibly prominent sports figure i'm not gonna say who it was but incredibly prominent sports figure of the late eighties and it was just me him and my mother in the elevator and i asked him for an autograph and he wouldn't even reply he looked at looked at me looked me up and down and just didn't reply and my mom tried to intervene and say you know this this child looks up to you like if you just would like say hello and nothing we got nothing from him and not to say that every male athlete is that way and not to say that every female athlete is fantastic or has these same ideologies that i'm thinking of or that i relate to with women's basketball but it's just you know a family atmosphere and i just feel like i'm part of something while i'm there whereas i don't often get that feeling when i'm at men's events mhmm that's at the end of each episode i ask people to make a pitch for their team that was an incredible pitch for the wnba josh i think like just talking about the environment that the wnba is able to curate especially if you're in person at these games it truly is inclusive and it's something that feels so special and so different than a lot of the other league counterparts that we see today and i'm hoping that it stays that way for a long time so that was just a a great answer and and we'll do a hard pivot away from that into what we're all here to talk about today which is cards and one of the things that i noticed with scrolling through your instagram page was a card that you talk about being like the first card or first wnba card excuse me that you bought back in twenty nineteen that was a chenay auto i believe and you posted back in twenty nineteen this was the first wnba card i ever purchased i haven't stopped since and i love this because this is a rittenhouse card it's one of the kind of like rabbit holes that you can go down in the hobby that a lot of people that joined the wnba card collecting community maybe haven't explored too much rittenhouse was you know the license or the manufacturer had the wnba license for fourteen years had really low scarce print runs and cards that you know even just existed as bonuses for people that bought complete sets directly from the company you've got some really cool cards that will go into that kind of fall into these super rare exclusive rittenhouse cards but let's start with that chenay auto was that kind of the card that started it and if so why did it kind of act as a a fire starter for your wnba collection well i you know back in twenty eleven and twenty twelve i had this really crazy cable system that had like seven or eight hundred channels and i had a pac twelve network that i would always watch late at night and i got to watch a lot of stanford women's basketball games back in that year so i fell in love with the ogu oguumike sisters from that point on and you know i remembered how much i enjoyed watching them play despite the fact that i had never watched play in the twenty nineteen i had found her card on ebay one day and it was such an obnoxiously low price do some research i realized it was her rookie card it was an on card auto which i thought was really cool these cards weren't heavily prevalent on ebay you couldn't find a lot of them out there i couldn't find any sales history or anything on it so i just bought it and from that point i started looking for more things of hers and this was in twenty nineteen so this was just as panini started with their don ross so there wasn't a lot of cards as you said the rittenhouse were very scarce the two thousand and nine through twenty eighteen those last ten years at most there were five hundred of each of those cards printed and some of them even less those the ones that you mentioned that were the the ones that were promotions if you'd buy three cases or five cases or whatever it is you'd get that autograph card some of those are numbered down in twenties and thirties i think the maya moore there was only twenty three or something of those cards so it's crazy and i started to fall into a deeper rabbit hole i started to buy her sister's cards then i started to see all the candace cards out there and then i found the wnba in twenty twenty being on television all the time so interesting interesting let's kinda dive into what it looks like being somebody who you know you're obviously educated on what exists out there in terms of wmea cards it's not the discovery of understanding that these exist it's finding them right and being able to procure them and put them into your collection what is kind of your acquisition strategy look like today versus say when you first started in twenty nineteen twenty twenty because the landscape of the hobby especially our segment we're talking about today the wnba has changed so much so what's kinda your your your strategy for finding and and you know buying these cards i'm slightly more selective you know back in twenty nineteen twenty twenty twenty one i was just trying to buy all the cool things that i would see then i realized that collecting everything wasn't attainable although there is an amazing collector in minnesota who virtually has every card ever but now i'm a little bit more selective i i would say i'm refined but as each year passes and new people join the league too i you know my list of players that i collect jumps every single season so again that's a tough one for me to answer because i don't know if there's one definitive way in which i handle it yeah and a lot of it maybe is still the same because back in twenty nineteen you could see when i started buying those i was buying one every month for the better part of a year till i got the dozen that i have and occasionally i'll come across those cards now and if it's a fair price i'll still buy it i don't actively search for them anymore i still have open ebay searches on a lot of this stuff and that stuff will pop up you know like i get notifications if a super grip comes up i get notifications if anything from twenty eighth two thousand and eight if candace parker pops up but those aren't things that i often like type into my search engine every day now more so it's the current stuff it's tough i know that when new product come out it's best to probably sit idly by and let other people buy it up at higher prices but i definitely with my hoarding mentality have that fear of missing out so when i see cards from twenty twenty five or twenty twenty six that are selling at prices i can afford whether or not i truly believe the card is worth that value sometimes i just buy it because i wanna have it you know i'm not looking at it as a opportunity to flip this into something else per se most of the cards that i buy i buy because i want them in my collection not to say that i haven't sold cards in the past i have but most of the time those are when i just can't just keep keeping something because it has gone up so incredibly at such a higher rate than what i paid for it i need need to sell it yeah i understand the kind of game of patience that we have to play as collectors that it's much easier said than done especially as cards continue to come out and continue to be cool and and players play well and you kind of form these these relationships with players especially being in person which i'm excited to get to to talk about the in person aspect but i wanna talk about one specific card josh because to be frank i was going through your instagram doing kinda like a a stock a crawl stock of your instagram before prepping for this episode and you talked about a card the candace parker promo card and you you wrote psa has only graded eleven of these and just four are better than your nine copy you grabbed it for less than the cost of a raw and that you were super excited about it i had never seen this card before do you mind like educating the audience about what we're talking about educating me about what the significance of this card is yeah i can try a lot of a lot of the education that i gained on ritten you used to be able to go to rittenhouse's website which i think is like sci fi hobby dot com or something like that because they're more known for doing game of thrones cards and stuff right along those lines they used to have an archive section on their wnba that would be really good at explaining to you print runs of certain things and where the the the cards came from or how many cases you had to buy in order to get some of them these promos weren't listed on there i only learned what they are from i think it was a beckett article back in the day that talked about the best candace parker cards and it mentioned this card so i'd found one on ebay it was really really cool it was pretty cheap pretty affordable at the time i think there were only i don't know how many seventeen or eleven or something graded like you mentioned it's not more than double that now which is fewer than her actual rookie card and from what i can understand is these were promo cards that were given out to the dealers that purchased the cases or the boxes to sell in store and they would give these promo cards to guests of their card shop i guess to entice them to purchase it that's about the gist probably tell you more i just knew it was scarce grabbed one when i could and i'm really happy with that card that's super cool those are the kind of cards that when i you know when people talk about these wnba cards they just get gobbled up in collections and then they don't come out that's kinda like the example of one it's like if you know you know and if you don't then too bad because you're not gonna figure it out because they're not coming out anytime soon so that's that's an interesting one thank you for sharing that one the other one that you kind of that i was interested in was a tina charles card it was like a two thousand eleven autograph could you talk a little bit about that one in twenty twenty after my wnba collecting had had started i think i said i i i'm always trying to collect sets and players and all that and i'll keep checklists checklists that i hope to fill the checklist and one of them the first ones that i did it was in twenty twenty and i had done the twenty three previous number one picks the wnba draft i want all the rookies in autographed form so there were twenty three rookie cards that i either needed to buy all the card into them that twenty ten one was also one of those really rare ones i think it was only given out to people that purchased x amount of sets so it was a little bit harder to find that one but it popped up one day and it was actually one of the final ones that i needed i still need a couple of more and over the last three years now cc and paige and az have joined that list because their rookie autos are quite pricey at this point in time so but yeah i was trying to collect every every rookie autograph of the number one pick from each year in the wnba oh that's cool i always like when people kinda make these own like their own chases like i've seen like in nfl collecting some people do like offensive player of the year and then make like a binder of each of those people so like to see that in the wnba i haven't seen too many people do that so that's that's super unique another thing that's unique about your dilapidated yeah yeah another thing that's said it's gotten debilitating yeah yeah yeah literally literally i hear you the next thing i kinda wanna talk about is something that's unique about your collection which is the in person autograph you kinda said you were a self proclaimed in person autograph hound earlier in the episode you've posted a bunch of them on your account i just kinda wanna go through the process of what that looks like for you do you plan which cards you're bringing are you bringing them to the arena are you bringing them pregame postgame and when did this kinda start is this a new thing you know i mean as a child i would go to baseball games all the time and try and and and get autographs it was one of the thing player and him tossing it down in the dugout and my glove reemerging with thirty autographs on it so i think ever since that point in time i've just been an autograph fiend and there's something about the in person one and that moment that you share with that athlete some better than others but either way it's a moment nonetheless and you watch them physically write their name on it it means more to me certainly than a sticker autograph but even a nice on card that someone signs you know five hundred of in a row this is something that i get to share with that athlete i think my most recent run of it started in twenty twenty two i went to the wnba all star game here in chicago and i had worked on the twenty twenty one prism orange set it's the hundred card wnba prism set the orange parallel number to fifty and i amassed all hundred players from that set and it took me about a year to get that whole set and i'm like now that i'm finished with it what am i gonna do so i woke up the morning of the wnba all star game flipped through that hundred card set that i pulled up eighteen cards i had of the women that were in the game then went over before the game got some autographs after the game inside i was able to get autographs after the game i was just walking around the building the players were walking back and forth between their hotel or their bus and i was able to get almost a dozen autographs that first that first time i tried here so i was like this is actually easy and i think that was gonna be all hard to a new search for me but in middle of this building if i'm ever not doing anything and haven't gone to the game and i'll watch the game on tv when it ends i can flip through my cards mostly pull out the home players because they're the ones that are most accessible nowadays but i can run into them on a near nightly basis after their home games and get autographs and they're all really cool with me a lot of them understand that i'm a fan and you know that we make the game what it is so it's been really fun meeting some of them over the years that's super cool when i looked at your page i saw a bunch of different players but a couple that stuck out to me were kalia copper courtney vandersloot ally quigley you mentioned before kinda what about those players drew you to them was it just that they're part of the sky because i know for me like when i was a kid or when i get in person autographs there's kinda like a a hierarchy i'm like oh i wish i could get this person because they're my favorite i could get this person because i they're harder to get or something like that what about these players kinda draws you to them is it is it just that they're really for your team or is it because you also enjoy something else about them no i i mean at first it was definitely that they played for the sky but then in my interactions over the years and i i don't know if i really developed a relationship with them but i got they recognized my face and i certainly recognized theirs and we would have conversations that were continuous from the previous time that i had seen them and i just started to grow such respect for courtney vanderson and ali quigley the fact that they can coexist in their professional careers and their off the court lives as well and still be the people that they are just i think says mountains about them and this league and how cool it is to support women like this and right i don't know my my passion for the two of them i mean aside from the fact that courtney is arguably the best player in the history of this franchise they were both there in twenty twenty one when we won that title and that team will just forever be you know in in my heart one hundred percent speaking of just like teams and players that mean a lot to you when i think of your collection i think of candace parker you wrote in one of your posts about her that she's the real cp3 which i really like and when she left you wrote that you know she gave you two of your absolute favorite days as a chicago chicagoan is that how you say it chicagoan yes and then i could never you could never thank her enough to me that's a big thing to say especially towards like a athlete i i know that when i talk about athletes and i say that they're my favorite that comes from hours and hours of watching them of appreciating them they put in a lot of time and effort kinda could you explain to me why candace parker and when you talk about those absolute favorite days what they were and kinda what they mean to you yeah again candace is one of the people that drew me to women's basketball from the two thousand and five two thousand and six i always enjoy in twenty twenty one when the sky signed it is when i started going full on going to sky games as much as i did one of those moments was that championship game in twenty twenty one i was at game five my friend kyle was there as well so i was there when chicago you know and miss for me and chicago i'm in the past four years i think that was the best i've been it also coincided with a day where the green bay packers played down the street at soldier field and it's kind of the infamous moment of i still f an on you so that day was just a fantastic day from the get go for me but the second one a few years ago i was invited to go to training of thirty seven words the film documentary film by espn on title nine it was hold by ken parker she went before the film and afterwards she did a meet and greet and it wasn't just like people in a line walking down and shaking her hand she stopped and took ten minutes with each person that was in that room and spoke to them individually trying to figure out why they were there and what it was that drew them to and then talk to them about who they were and it was her and i talked to some ambassadors and she shared with how much she appreciated me in being a fan of the league and i truly know a lot of people can always say that but i truly jen she goes through a photograph and they in awesome awesome autograph so two fantastic days that both of them were largely because of candace parker oh that's so sweet that's that's like dream interaction with one of your favorite athletes you can only hope that they'll give you the time of day let alone have like a genuine conversation so that's that's super cool and i can imagine that kind of memorializing that fandom in terms of cards has been an incredible kind of like therapeutic exercise especially as she no longer is playing like to be able to just continue to collect her cards is super great you mentioned in your response about courtney vandersloot and then about candace parker how they're kind of some of the greats of the franchise each of these episodes i've asked people to try to pick the mount rushmore of their franchise if you go through the entire history the best four players to play for your team are those two making the cut and if so who's joining them they are and i might get some pushback on candice just because the vast majority of her career was spent elsewhere she only played in chicago for two years but the title was won in that year and her being from a chicago suburb and her constantly talking about how much chicago means to her she's going on my mount rushmore and van der sloot a lot of people don't give her the respect that they need to her twenty eleven rookie card is still way way underpriced she's the all time leading scorer in the history of this franchise and again was on that twenty twenty one championship team so she's forever on there the two other players that i have on there a little bit before that time sylvia foles i wish that she would have spent a little bit longer of her career here and would have been able to win a title but unfortunately she moved on to get them somewhere else as well as elena delle don another player same situation she was an icon here a legend unfortunately we couldn't get it done when she was here and she went on to do it elsewhere thankfully for dela don she brought us kalia copper in returning a trade so that was large in us winning the twenty twenty one but yeah sylvia foles elena della don candace parker and courtney vandersloot that's my sky mount rushmore i like that mount rushmore i'm a huge della don fan like she's one of my favorite players period ever like when i when i think about you know me looking up to women when i was playing basketball at like a terrible terrible level but like you know you look up to them still she was the one for me because i wore number eleven she wore eleven like she was in chicago which was the closest to green bay so whenever dela dawn's mentioned i cosign as a stamp of approval for me so i like that the next kind of nice i just rapid go ahead just recently picked up deladan's twenty thirteen rookie card at a really crazy low price i'm super happy about that it's first one i've been able to get nice nice those that that era of cards is still so undervalued in her cards especially especially with like the resume that she has she's somebody that i one hundred percent think is a great great buy okay the next rapid fire question that i have for you is another one that i ask everybody which is if you had to try to describe your franchise in three words or less could you do it and if you could could you share that with us and expand yeah i think i wrote down about seventeen words but okay some of them would probably get edited out okay i'll just say disarray disarray for starters seemed just seemed so disorganized and doesn't appear to have any direction we felt like this and i say we i feel like i'm speaking on behalf of most of the sky fans here we were in a really good place after the draft of angel you said rapid fire i digress we're gonna say disarray is one of them disheartening because it just seems like this is what it is and it's gonna continue to go this way and irreparable and i i try to be optimistic in life i am not a person that likes to be pessimistic about things i think that you can manifest a lot just by a positive attitude so it pains me to say these things but and i'm not talking necessarily about the players on this organization or even the fan base i'm talking specifically about the management who seem to pull one thing and then just swerve and go another direction and it's been you know the fool me once fool me twice i feel like we're on fool me seven or eight times now and we really can't take it anymore me and my buddy who i share season tickets with are contemplating letting him go and we can't come up with a reason not to right now so it's again disarray disheartening and irreparable i hope that things get better i hope that our general manager finds a new career and if he's not gonna leave on his own i hope that our ownership does something about that but something's gotta change here this this can't we're too big of a market we're too wonderful of a fan base we have too many good pieces in place this just doesn't make any sense it really doesn't ugh this is so sad to hear because i agree i think all the ingredients to make a great franchise have been proven that they're there and management is just throwing that shit out the window i don't understand what's going on in chicago i don't understand the strategy it feels like negligence to me i thought like the angel reece of it all is something that i'd like to talk to you about because my question for you is to me it felt like angel reese was kind of this key to success it was like you were being handed a solution and an antidote to the kind of the the problems that you were having a cure and then they said yeah we recognize that but no more what were your feelings on the whole angel reece situation having her kind of bestowed upon your city she embraced it she embraced her role with the team and then she got traded away what what were the feelings josh yeah i still am not over that angel was beloved here and rightfully so she came here and she wanted to be here this was her city she grew up on the east coast and then went to school down in louisiana and she wanted to be a chicagoan she loved it here and it seemed like a turning point after a year and year and a half of struggles getting angel seemed like okay we're gonna start winning some games games things are gonna turn around they had added cardoso in that same draft beforehand so it seemed like the team was on the up and up angel definitely sold seats we saw our season ticket prices from the year before she was drafted to the year after go up over three x we had to downgrade our seats because we could no longer afford to sit where we were because it i mean it was the caitlin clark effect shirt but angel was part of that as well and for her it it ripped the soul out of a lot of us when they traded it because i was a denier when everyone kept saying angel's getting traded angel's getting traded i just kept on with there's no way that we could be that stupid you know just let this let the things calm down everyone's gonna think this through and the day that it happened was so surreal but as a season ticked a little i didn't know what to do i didn't wanna get mad and just turn my back on the organization so i've never done that while we were down for a few days they started making some signings and it was like okay it's different but i think we could still win with these players but as it turns out what we weren't seeing in the press was that it was the same old shenanigans from the general management making promises that they had no intention of keep they got rid of angel largely in part because her personality was larger than they wanted i don't wanna say to deal with but they didn't want any one player shining more than anyone else that's just the way that i looked at it from that so their removal of angel was more about removing her big personality and signing skylar diggins while i love skylar and have so much respect for her if they thought she was just gonna stand idly by and be quiet while they pulled this shit again excuse my language i i don't know what they were thinking they must be insane they have to be insane because i don't know skylar personally but i knew that i knew that wasn't gonna work and they paid her millions of dollars and i feel bad for her now because we we lied to her we told her that this was going to be this way and that this training facility was gonna be done and none of it they never had intention to do any of it they just wanted to get players in here to play for a year and i think they'll just deal with it next year and we've traded away all of our draft picks we got two draft picks back for angel reese but by a team that's one of the best in the wnba now so those those picks at best are gonna be twelfth in the first round yeah we gave up a first round pick for jc sheldon a player we could have drafted the year prior with a lesser pick that's gonna turn out to be a really good pick we give up for jc sheldon now and no disrespect to jc sheldon she's having a fine season and she tries hard but man this organization makes so many mistakes like this and i feel like they never have to answer for any of it even after the angel trade i don't remember ever hearing a press conference with the general manager explaining to us why they did this or why they felt this was going to work or the best move for the team we just had to accept it because with the chicago sky it just is what it is that's one of the big and most frustrating things about it this pisses me off fool for falling for it again no this pisses me off like the sky and sky fans to our sky fans that are listening you guys deserve better like you deserve better and there has been better you know what i mean like and there are players that deserve not only to get their time on the floor and to have a good franchise that supports them but also to have people that collect their cards and they exist out there and so this is just like so frustrating to hear especially in a league that has seen nothing nothing but growth over the past five years to see a team almost regressing is quite upsetting it's one thing if you draft somebody and it doesn't work out it's one thing if you have a coach and they don't coach well for a year and then you pivot this team continues to make the same mistakes over and over again and it's all coming down to the general management and i cannot imagine what that feels like as a fan i would be so pissed off josh so i hope that you know by talking about it at least it can like let it off your chest and people feel heard other sky fans hope that they're not it's therapeutic yeah yeah but damn it is hard so i guess i wanna ask you when you're kinda going through this tough moment you know obviously i think you know as you said you try to stay optimistic there's always a light at the end of the tunnel it can't be this way forever at least you know we hope not what does that look like in terms of collecting cards does the does the focus stay the same or does it change when you're going through kind of a rough patch i think the rough patch causes a natural like waning not so much an interest but i'm i'm not full on i need to collect these sky players every single day while i'm watching them lose on a consistent basis fault of them because some of them are playing just fine and truthfully if sydney taylor had rookie cards i'd be broke right now but i definitely find myself i you know i have had a lot of success getting really great maddie cards over the last year despite her not playing this year i probably would have continued to buy them if the team wasn't eleven and eighteen so you know their poor play definitely affects my desire to search for sky cards i would say i won't say that it shuts it down permanently because i think i got a bunch of maddie cards in the mail today but yeah certainly it's it's it's good for my pocketbook i guess yeah right right here's a question that i always think is interesting we have this term that apparently we may have coined on the wnba card podcast i have no way of confirming this but it's called the disrespect index it's this concept in cards that somebody's playing super well on the court and for whatever reason the market of card collectors is not reflecting that same level of play in terms of financial value and so i've asked everybody to try to pick one player from their franchise current or past that would rank the highest on the disrespect index so for the chicago sky who are you picking josh and why there's a few players that i think are undervalued most of them are rookies from the past i mean i do think camilla's prices are affordable but i also think that camilla needs to play more defense so we'll see we'll see how those prices handle i mentioned earlier that van de sloot rookie card that that twenty eleven on card auto is still like tragically underpriced and the same with foyles she's a hall of famer but there's one card in particular of player that i still think has room for growth and i think by the end of their career we're gonna be like wow she was a really really underrated player azaree stevens you can pick up her twenty eighteen rookie cards for sometimes like twenty twenty five dollars i think i even saw an autographed one for about forty not too long ago that set only printed five hundred to begin with and a lot of them are still locked up in sets i have two sealed sets in my closet over there that aren't going anywhere so those don't come out very often and to see them listed at twenty twenty five dollars is insane she's way far too good of a player and sydney taylor we haven't seen a market for her yet because she doesn't have a card but hopefully everybody's buying olivia miles next year so i can get all the sydney taylor cards out there i have a feeling you will be able to at least a little bit i find the call out of the twenty eighteen stevens interesting as well because i've i'm on record saying that i believe certain sets are affiliated with great players and that trickles through the kind of markets so what i mean by that is you know asia wilson is the premier chase in that set right and so therefore that design that card has significance and will be recognizable as the asia year and therefore at some point somebody's gonna wanna put together and already there are people doing this but like have the set and have the complete set or have the rookies from that set and i think that that also is another thing that when we talk about the disrespect index it's interesting because there should almost be an implied value to those cards because of just the set that they come from let alone the play so it's an interesting layer to add on to the conversation but i like that pick especially because she's a player that i think a lot of people just overlook and has like major impact on games so yeah that's a that's a good pick josh she's a double double waiting to happen yeah one hundred percent alright let's let's move to kinda like the the final segment my favorite segment that we do each episode which is the personal grail i ask each guest to take a look at their collection try their best to think about which one card best represents your team and wnba fandom josh i know you probably had a lot to choose from here which card did you choose and kinda could you walk us through the story of why this card yeah for sure there were a lot of chart i i had stacks of cards that i pulled out on this one and at first i was looking for only a player in a sky uniform but you know a lot of the players that i were not always on the sky so i was thinking candace cards but i couldn't get over the fact that she was in a sparks jersey on the rookie card i do have some candace cards that i would consider my grail but i think i mentioned this to you in a instagram message i sent you with a picture of this card that for me grail doesn't always mean monetarily like the best card i have or cards that are really tough to purchase they're more cards that i don't feel like i could replace so i did have that love of candice parker from way back in her college playing days and that was like my additional or my initial like introduction to women's basketball and then that grew as i started to watch college basketball later on once candace made it to the wnba and i started following that i loved it even more obviously when she came to the chicago sky she became one of my all time favorite players of any sport ever i mentioned those two times that i had the opportunity or that presented this great great experience for me the one being while i met her at a meet and greet so i about pat summitt and her time at tennessee i explained to her that i wished she had come to the university of wisconsin back in two thousand and five and she whether she was just coddling me or whatever she said that it was on a short list of things she was considering woah then i explained to her that i wanted her to join the university of wisconsin now as i either the men's or women's basketball coach or even the athletic director she laughed it off i was very serious but she laughed it off but nonetheless she's as much as as i love in person autographs meeting her and that experience that day and the moment we shared autographs that i have including several from a rookie year this is still my favorite one awesome awesome just a sweet card like just the store not only the card but the story and i think that's so important and so josh that's like just an awesome one i think candace is is great and i i was i had kind of this prebuilt question for you based on what you answered of how many copies do you have of the card so i'm assuming it's just this one you don't have multiple of this one david i only have the one autograph copy i mean i have several other copies of that card and it is a short print card but yeah that's another reason why i'd chosen that card to go with me because it's somewhat of a rare a rare canvas card got it awesome well maybe if you find another one or you can meet her again you can get another one and then you can keep stacking and get all of them i still need to get that twenty twenty one orange prism sign virus alright well that's that's next i guess that's the next mission josh i wanna say thank you so much for joining the podcast today talking about the sky talking about a team that has a rich history and is kind of like just in this weird spot right now navigating what that means as a fan and a collector is super interesting to hear about i hope that our sky fans feel heard and feel seen and that if you know you guys are looking to look at cool cards you can find josh at love the dubs i'm just to swear more yeah yeah that's what they wanted that's what they wanted but if you guys are looking for him like i said it's at love the dubs on instagram josh instagram josh do you have anything else you wanna say before i hit you with our last question no we're good go pack go but you're probably the only one that agree with me on that one i love that one well every episode ends the same way which is this question josh if you'll indulge me if somebody today is looking to root for a wnba team and to collect their cards could you make a pitch for the chicago sky i can't we have a future we have a future things can't continue this way they can't mess it up year after year either something's gotta give or we're just gonna pull through it sydney taylor great undrafted rookie i can't wait to see what she does in the future hopefully we're able to hold on to maddie and a few of the players we brought in this year like rekhaia jackson excited to see what she could do with a full year availability we have all the pieces in play this year except for one and it's gonna get worked out i mean we're a great city we're cheaper than new york and los angeles the people are way nicer here there's no way we can continue to fail this we have to get better awesome we'll leave it at that i manifest this for you josh and for all the skye fans out there thanks everybody for listening to this week's episode of the wnba card podcast we've got a lot more episodes lined up for you as we round out season five thanks for being here