Peter Forsberg Jersey Card

Because injuries cut his Hall Of Fame career short yet he was still good enough to make the cut, many like to compare Peter Forsberg's statistics with those of the likes of Eric Lindros to make the case for less deserving players, except with Forsberg, the numbers - while great - don't tell the whole story.

We're talking about a two-time Stanley Cup champion, who was the third ever member to have enough championships to join the Triple Gold club twice, and his domination at the international level is unparalleled, from his record 31 points in 7 games at the World Juniors to World Championship gold at age 18 to his gold-winning shootout goal at the 1994 Olympics to his back-to-back MVP titles (of both the league-awarded and player-voted variety) in Sweden to Calder, Hart and Art Ross trophies in the NHL.

And then there's the top-5 marks in points-per-game and assists-per-game which ranks him with the likes of Mario Lemieux, Wayne Gretzky and Bobby Orr. He wasn't merely ''very good with a couple of dominant years'', whenever he had skates on, he was often the best player on the ice - and I say this as a guy whose favourite player was Joe Sakic. He was the Sergei Fedorov to Sakic's Steve Yzerman, where there was no way teams could shut both down, and if they were lucky, they could contain one of them - they just had to pick the lesser of two evils. But even that didn't work all the time, and both were tremendous two-way players anyway, so even on the rare occasions where they didn't make it onto the score sheet, they were useful on the ice, smart and crafty, positionally sound, and Foppa with the added physical element to his game.

This card (#FF-PF) is from Upper Deck's flagship 2003-04 Upper Deck set, the Franchise Fabrics sub-set, and shows him in the Colorado Avalanche's burgundy (then-away) uniform, with a blue game-worn jersey swatch:

The color scheme and font make this look a little too "retro" for my taste, but I do not find it displeasing to the eye.