This one....
We are not Duke, nor Carolina (insert snarky comment about attending class), but State is still a decent basketball program. In the past few years the Wolfpack have been a regular in the NCAA Tournament and made it into the Sweet Sixteen twice. One of those appearances resulted in the infamous crying piccolo girl at Villanova.....
The past two years have been disappointing though. The team has regressed back to their form from when I was in school there. Bottom half of the league in the standings, poor play from highly recruited players, etc. I thought we were past things like this.......
which was easily the worst thing I have ever seen at a basketball game. State hasn't even really had the chance to lose games that dramatically the past two years. They have just been bad. Still, there have been some really good players on the team the past two years. Last year the Wolfpack were led by super freshman Dennis Smith Jr. The previous year the team had sensational point guard Anthony "Cat" Barber.
Barber is from Newport News and draws a lot of comparisons to Allen Iverson. They are from the same area, both are small undersized guards with a lot of speed.
Cat ended up leaving State after his junior year of college and spent a chunk of last season in the D-League. I still have hope that he will crack an NBA roster at some point. He's a great player, hard worker, no doubt he will have a chance.
In the meantime, I have ventured out looking for a few nice basketball cards of the shifty guard. I love that you can find cards of players in their college basketball uniforms. He actually has three or four cards out there, but I liked this Panini card the best....
Just a beautiful card, made way better by the fact that Cat Barber autographed the card with just the word Cat. The gold pen looks nice on the black background. The card actually has a fairly glossy finish, but it looks a little bit on the matte side after the scan.....the back of the card.....
The back does seem to have some sort of weird two sided thing going on, if you look at the middle of Cat's face. Not sure what effect Panini was going for here. Still I like the black and white picture with the NC State logo down at the bottom of the card. Happy to start off the Cat Barber collection and hope to add a few more nice autographs in the near future. Hopefully a few of them will be of Cat in an NBA uniform....
The 30 for 30 special about the NS State run to the title is one of my favorite episodes of that program.
ReplyDeleteThat gold on black signature is solid. Although... he needs to spice up his signature. Maybe add some whiskers or something.
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