Thursday, March 3, 2016

Ben Bishop Jersey Card

It's been a good week for Ben Bishop...

A day after being named to Team USA for September's World Cup, Bishop was in net for the Tampa Bay Lightning's team record eighth-straight win - against his former Ottawa Senators team, no less - making 33 saves in a 4-1 win in the process. His record against the Sens? 9-0-3...

Then again, all three of my favourite goalies made the World Cup's initial rosters: Bishop for the Americans, Corey Crawford for Team Canada, and Jaroslav Halak for Team Europe...

How good is Bishop? In October, the Vezina nomine became the Bolts' all-time wins leader in just his third full season with the team, surpassing Stanley Cup winner Nikolai Khabibulin... with 84. I'm not sure how much Tampa is committed to Bishop with Andrei Vasilevskiy and Kristers Gudlevskis in the pipeline, however, at 29 years old, entering his prime, he could reasonably be expected to win at least 35 games per in the next five seasons, which would lead him close to 300, the kind of number most franchise goalies get to.

In the NHL game series, I usually choose the Montréal Canadiens in Be A GM mode, and my first move is usually to grab Bishop and Alex Killorn for Carey Price, and start winning some Stanley Cups.

Here he is, with his Tron-inspired mask, wearing the Lightning's blue (home) uniform, on card #GJ-BI from Upper Deck's 2015-16 Series 1 collection and UD Game Jersey sub-set, featuring a matching game-worn jersey swatch:
The line that appears on his blocker side is from the penny sleeve of another card I scanned at the same time and didn't realize was overlapping.

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