Mathias Niederberger Autograph Card

After three seasons on this side of the pond, goalie Mathias Niederberger went back home to Germany, playing for his hometown Duesseldorf Eislauf-Gemeinschaft (EG) for the last three years to boot.

He had been named the OHL's Goalie Of The Week in 2012 when he posted two consecutive shutouts for the Barrie Colts, then was given an AHL contract with the Manchester Monarchs, but opted to move back to Germany after playing in the ECHL more often (9 games) than the AHL (6 games) in an injury-plagued 2013-14 season.

He was named the DEL's Goaltender of the Year in 2015-16. Chances are he'll represent Team Germany at the 2018 Olympics, like his father has done four times.

Here he is wearing the Colts' white (home) uniform, on card #A-MN from In The Game's 2012-13 Between The Pipes set and Authentic Goaliegraph sub-set:

It features a black-sharpied on-sticker autograph with his uniform number (35) tagged underneath.

Alexandre Volchkov Autograph card

It's been a while, eh? Sorry, I've been really busy at work, and my childhood friend is jailed in Russia, so I kind of have to play news reporter to our other friends...

But back to the reason I'm writing this, Alexandre Volchkov, the player the Washington Capitals chose with the 4th-overall pick in the 1996 draft ahead of such players as Jonathan Aitken (8th), Ruslan Salei (9th), Josh Holden (12th), Dainius Zubrus (15th), Marco Sturm (20th), Daniel Brière - yes that one - (24th), Jan Bulis (43rd), Mathieu Garon (44th), Zdeno Chara (56th) annd Pavel Kubina (179th). Ok, so it wasn't that deep a draft, and the few stars that did emerge were almost-accidents, but Volchkov is nonetheless considered a ''bust'' by most standards.

He had lit up the OHL a bit by accumulating 82 points in 56 games with the Barrie Colts (by comparison, though, Bulis had 102...), but he wasn't part of the league's top-10 in any category...

The card I'm featuring does show him wearing the Colts black (away) uniform, though the team's logo has been airbrushed off for copyright issues:

Here's how I described this set from The Score Board in this post about Joe Thornton:

The card is an insert, signed in blue sharpie, from the 1997-98 The Score Board collection. The way TSB worked, essentially, was they would purchase packs of cards like you and I, from all the other manufacturers, sell the valuable cards to hobby shops and repackage the rest in new packs combining those of all brands (but inevitably more of those they got for cheaper, like Pro Set or Parkhurst), and adding signed inserts of prospects from Canadian junior leagues and American colleges to 'up' the value of their packs.

And so it is that we have this Volchkov card signed in blue charpie. Awesome penmanship for a guy with just 3 NHL games on his resume, though he was still playing professionally in the vicinity of Russia in 2010 (I have no idea where he could be these days, since even Hockey DB stopped listing his statistics in 2003).