Robert Mayer Autographed Card

I picked up mail from one of my old apartments tonight (where a friend still lives part-time) and was in for a treat, which I'll post in bits in the coming weeks interspersed with players appearing in worthwhile news items and/or whatever transpires in the Stanley Cup Final, but I'll start with one of my favourite signers, goaltender Robert Mayer.

I know it's overkill with four posts in two years (and at least another one coming eventually), but the guy's a really cool dude who goes out of his way to please his fans - and he's a pretty good goalie too. He's shown he was elite in the AHL with both good and awful teams, and he knew he wouldn't have a shot at cracking the Montréal Canadiens' roster with Carey Price manning the net, so the 25-year-old opted to go play in Switzerland in 2014-15 (and the following two seasons), for the sixth-place Genève-Servette Aigles (Eagles), winning the Spengler Cup in December in the process.

On the Aigles, he joined fellow former Habs properties Francis Bouillon, Matt D'Agostini and Tom Pyatt. They're already on their second consecutive Spengler Cup, it'd be nice if they could three-peat next winter.

Either way, I'll be watching.

So this card was in a small padded envelope, from the 2012-13 Hamilton Bulldogs team set (#29, his jersey number, in the collection) by Extreme Sports Cards, showing him in the team's white uniform:

It's signed in thin blue sharpie with his number tagged at the end, and shows him in his signature butterfly-ready base position. He keeps his glove hand high, but he's fast enough to get it down in time to grab the puck should it go lower. At the AHL level, he looked a lot like the 1989 version of Mike Vernon, eating up the puck with his left hand all the time. He's my favourite non-NHL active goalie, in case you couldn't tell from everything I've written about him in the past couple of years.

Patrick Lalime Autograph Card

It's often forgotten just how good Patrick Lalime was, probably because his Ottawa Senators would fall to the Toronto Maple Leafs every Spring. However, he finished in the top-10 for Vezina Trophy votes twice - and not even in his spectacular rookie season, where he went undefeated in his first 16 NHL starts, going 14-0-2 with the Pittsburgh Penguins after injuries befell Ken Wregget and Tom Barrasso - not unlike the situation Andrew Hammond faced with the Sens this year - and got an All-Rookie Team nod.

Upon leaving Ottawa, Lalime had somewhat underwhelming seasons with the St. Louis Blues and Chicago Blackhawks (due to injury in the latter case) before redeeming and reinventing himself as a reliable backup with the Buffalo Sabres for his final three seasons in the league.

He then turned to broadcasting, first as the colour commentator and analyst for Sens games on RDS, and this year for Montréal Canadiens games on TVA Sports. While he currently pales in comparison to his Habs counterpart on RDS broadcasts (Marc Denis), as his whole network does, hopefully he can improve enough over the 11 remaining seasons of his station's broadcast deal to make up for lost ground.

Like Jeff Glass before him and Robin Lehner nowadays, Lalime wore #40 with the Sens, as can be seen here in this beautiful silver foil card from In The Game's 2002-03 Be A Player Signature Series card (#035 in the set, signed on-card in thin black sharpie with his jersey number tagged at the end), showing him wearing the team's beautiful, original white (then-home) uniform:

He's exhibiting the perfect butterfly-style basic position, with his glove around the mid-body like I teach kids to do (except I prefer when it stands out straight, not downwards like here, because split-seconds matter more than ever before nowadays). His masks were cool and pretty much always featured Marvin The Martian from the Looney Tunes animations.

Chris Osgood Jersey Card

I'm reading a lot of nonsense online regarding this current Stanley Cup Final pitting the Tampa Bay Lightning's Ben Bishop against the Chicago Blackhawks' Corey Crawford, and how neither is ''elite'' and how it's a return to the days of the 1990s Detroit Red Wings winning the Cup with Chris Osgood in nets.

First things first: Bishop was nominated for a Vezina last year, and has three shutouts this postseason, two of them in Game Sevens. He beat fellow U.S. Olympian Jimmy Howard, outplayed likely Vezina winner and gold medalist Carey Price and matched the best goalie in the world, Vezina winner, gold medalist and Stanley Cup Finalist Henrik Lundqvist to get to the Final. Is he as stable and consistent as Hank? No, but no one save for perhaps Pekka Rinne is.

Regardless where you rank him, he's got to be in your top-10. He's likely in my top-5, where he only surpasses Crawford because the Hawks boast Duncan Keith and Brent Seabrook as their top two defensemen. The last time the Hawks won the Cup, Conn Smythe Trophy winner Patrick Kane famously said ''Crow'' deserved the nod - and he wasn't just saying that. Sure, he has his off games, and like many of this current generation, they come relatively more often than goalies in prior decades (every 8 to 10 games instead of every 12 to 15 like in the 1990s), many of them in groups of two or three bad outings, all of them highly-publicized. But in between those sequences are usually 8-game stretches where his save percentage hovers around the .950 mark, where he'll give up a single goal per game while facing upwards of 35 shots, sometimes over 40; he's not a ''pure stopper'', he won't get the shutout, but he'll be spectacular in letting just one in. He might lose focus and turn a 5-1 sure victory into a 5-3 nail-biter with less than 5 minutes remaining, but when the pressure's mounting and he needs to wake up, he pretty much always does. And that's what elite goalies do.

Granted, Osgood never had to do any of that. He finally learned to do a decent butterfly style ten years into his NHL career, whilst with the New York Islanders. He's mostly known for his postseason prowess yet ranks 10th of all time in regular-season wins (401); on the flipside, he played with the 1990s Wings - one of three teams that contended for Cups consistently for more than a decade (with the New Jersey Devils and Colorado Avalanche) and who kept purchasing the most expensive free agents of the Dead Puck Era.

And the Dead Puck Era is also why his career playoff GAA ranks better than Patrick Roy's, who won two Cups (and two Conn Smythe Trophies along with another Cup Final in 1989) before the Devils flipped The Trap into a Cup-winning formula.

He also scored a goal, which ranks him in the Ron Hextall and Martin Brodeur category, with José Theodore and seven others. But his save percentage was below the .900 mark five times in 17 seasons, and below .910 another four times, so while he may have scored once, he got scored on a whole lot more than that. But he has two Jennings Trophies and was a finalist for the Vezina once.

Arguing his case for the Hall is funny, because some folks are passionate about the subject - regardless of which side of the argument they fall on. Ultimately, he's a ''no'' (I mean come on, Rogatien Vachon's not even in it and he played on Team Canada teams at the Canada Cup and has NHL hardware) in my book, but it's a decent argument. For the record, I'd place Theodore as a ''maybe'' and Curtis Joseph as a ''no'' ahead of Osgood. Mike Vernon as well.

Here he is wearing the Wings' classic red (then-away) uniform, from Topps' 2000-01 Heritage set (card #OSJ-CO of the The Original Six Relics, Authentic Player-Worn Jersey insert sub-set), with a white swatch:

It's actually much darker to the naked eye, I guess when I scanned it over a year ago I forgot to play around with the settings.

Steve Christoff Autographed Card

I really started getting into card collecting in 1986-87, although I'd had a few packs of hockey and baseball cards here and there previously, but that was the year where my whole world of toys and collectibles was all about cards instead of G.I. Joe, Transformers, M.A.S.K. and Thundercats figurines; my parents were thrilled at first because they figured it'd be cheaper, but that 35-cent pack I'd get as a ''tip'' every time I'd ''volunteer'' to go get whatever we needed at the convenience store probably amounted to a lot more in the end.

That's when I got the bug, and one summer, I ''worked'' with my grandmother, helping her sell shoes and purses (I think) at a flea market, and the seller a few tables/stands over had a bunch of randomly-divided packs of 100 hockey cards from the late 1970s and early 1980s, and that's where I spent all of my allowance and whatever pay I got for the duration of July and August.

Later, as the 1990s came along and card stores started popping up everywhere, I traded a bunch of O-Pee-Chee cards for their Topps equivalent because it felt more exclusive to have the imported (American) brand than the local (Canadian) one, even though both were worth the same.

One such trade from a card I'd originally gotten at that flea market was this one, of Steve Christoff, which I got him to sign with a black eraser-board marker in the first half of the '90s, I'd say around 1993 in one of three trips my local team made to Minneapolis (we also had annual trips to Boston and New Jersey in the United States):

It's from Topps' 1981-82 Topps set (card #104, its O-Pee-Chee equivalent being #160), showing him as a member of the Minnesota North Stars, a team I didn't feel any emotion towards until I played for the NDG North Stars as a kid, at which point I started liking Neal Broten and Don Beaupre.

Christoff was one of the star forwards of the 1980 Olympics Team USA - you know, the Miracle On Ice team - along with Broten and Dave Christian. Prior to that, he'd been a star with the University of Minnesota Gophers, and like Broten and Phil Vercota, was a local boy who'd grown up and gone to school in Minnesota, played for Gophers then the national team based in Minneapolis, then was drafted by the North Stars in the second round in 1978 - the hometown hero route.

He had three decent seasons with the North Stars, starting off with 15 points in 20 games in 1979-80, 26 goals and 39 points in 56 games in 1980-81 and another 26 goals this time totaling 55 points in 69 games and another 16 points in 18 playoff games in 1981-82, losing in the Stanley Cup Final to the New York Islanders.

Unfortunately, he was traded to the Calgary Flames where he didn't quite fit in (17 points in 45 games in 1982-83), so they sent him and the draft pick that became Frantisek Musil to the Los Angeles Kings for Mike Eaves and Keith Hanson, and he only played 58 games with L.A., with 15 points and a -19 to show for it before calling it quits.

He's still a hero in Minnesota, and in every traditional hockey state; these days, he's an airplane pilot, which is fitting, considering he was among the fastest and strongest players of his era. He also had a heavy shot, if I remember correctly.

Bill Guerin Autograph Card

I thought I could start the month of June by checking #9 off my Oilers Numbers Project with this card of Bill Guerin's:

It's the signed insert version of card #53 from In The Game's 1998-99 Be A Player set, signed on-card in thin black sharpie with his number (9) tagged at the end, showing him in the Edmonton Oilers' white (then-home) mid-1990s uniform.

The fourth-overall pick of the 1989 NHL draft (by the New Jersey Devils), Guerin was a tough, no-nonsense, talented grinding goal scorer (in that order). Sure, he finished his career with a relatively even 429 goals and 427 assists (good for 856 points) in 1263 regular-season games and another 39 goals and 35 assists (74 points) in 140 playoff games, but he never really came close to the point-per-game mark, and yet had a 41-goal season (2001-02 with the Boston Bruins, the year he finished on the Second All-Star Team) and two other 30-goal seasons, and he once led the league with 10 game-winners (2003-04 with the Dallas Stars).

He also holds the NHL record of most teams with which an single player has had 20-goal seasons, with 7; only one other even has 5 (Eddie Shack).

Often a member of Team USA, he won the 1996 World Cup with Chris Chelios and Mike Richter, and has a silver medal (2002) in four Olympics. He played in four All-Star Games (2001, 2003, 2004 and 2007) and was named the MVP in his first appearance, scoring a hat trick (3 goals) with 2 assists playing on an All-American line with Tony Amonte and Doug Weight.

While he won Stanley Cups in New Jersey (1995) and with the Pittsburgh Penguins (2009), I don't really like those organizations, and I'm iffy about the merits of those championship teams (the 1994-95 Trap Devils' lock-out Cup in particular), and I'm a pretty big fan of the Oilers, so I choose to mostly remember him playing for Edmonton. I also felt that he deserved the New York Islanders' captaincy (2007-09), as did Weight who followed him, and I wish he'd stayed with the St. Louis Blues a bit longer. Seeing him (and Weight) in blue was always a natural fit.

Guerin is now the Pen's assistant general manager, after starting as their player development coach upon retiring. I particularly liked when he answered Sportsnet's Doug MacLean on the issue of the Pens' reputation as whiners by... admitting to it. You can bet if there's one thing in the team's culture he'd like to change, that'd be it, considering how straight-ahead and balls-out he played - hard and fair, never giving up. A true leader.