Tuesday, August 4, 2020

Quick study on Jagr stick usage for 19-20 Engrained Remnants

I fully admit this should be filed under "internet pedant". However, I was looking at the recent Jagr cards in Upper Deck's release of 2019-20 UD Engrained. I know it is no mystery that there are oftentimes mismatched player uniforms and the game-used equipment in the card itself.

For Engrained, Jagr is pictured in Pens jerseys. However, based on the images on eBay thus far, UD used basically two sticks, neither of which he used as a Pens player.

The card images I nabbed from eBay, so they may very well belong to some of you here.

From the regular /100 Remnants--

These came from a CCM Vector model Jagr used with the Rangers. CCM appears a few different places, so they had several choices depending on how the stick was cut up:

Stick sections:

Upside-down "M":

Stick:

Bottom with shield and warranty:

Stick:

Bottom just by the nameplate:

Stick:

And this particular pattern appears under the handle area, so it seems they removed the tape as the white line is near the top:

Stick: (sorry, not removing my tape!)

They also used a Pure Combat stick, a model he used during his Dallas/Bruins/Flyers days.

The "P" and juuuust a touch of the "U":

Stick:

A gold line:

Stick:

The Auto Remnants are /35. There are a few very generic stick pieces, so it is hard to tell where they came from. But these two came from the Pure Combat stick again:

Gold line:

Stick:

The "U" and a bit of the "R":

Stick:

EDIT: There is one copy of the Flexures that has some distinguishing letters, but I forgot to look for it on my sticks. Maybe later...

So some questions:
1. Does this mean UD only has these two sticks in their possession at this time?
2. Did they simply use Pens pics because Jagr collectors tend to be more interested in his earlier career? Was it licensing?
3. If they had pieces of old Christian sticks or the old Koho models he used with the Pens, would they sell better?

Just random things I think about these days!