If You Build It, They Will Come

 The Hoops release is a good point to check on the status of Iowa Connections in the NBA and whom the minds at Panini have dubbed important enough to have a card.  Hoops is good one to use because of the size of the set (300 cards) which covers more than most other sets.   According to my records there are 25 Iowa Connections in the NBA this season.  Some are coaches which won't be covered by Hoops (unless accidently in the background.)  Let's see how many made it: #51 Tyrese Haliburton #155 Doug McDermott #156 Joe Wieskamp #158 Harrison Barnes #175 Talen Horton-Tucker #190 Monte Morris #234 Keegan Murray #284 Keegan Murray We  have 8 cards and 7 connections, exactly the same connection count as last year.  This year Keegan Murray replaced Luka Garza. Excluding coaches, who is missing?  Well as mentioned above, Luka Garza for the Timberwolves is missing.  He started the season on the Iowa Wolves, so that is probably why.  Also missi...

 I'd like to start a new series of posts where I list the Iowa Connections within each set, but that is ridiculous, so I plan on doing one major set for each season.  Obviously Topps with baseball, but with the Panini sports its not quite as obvious.  You need a larger checklist, and preferably one that comes out during the season.  I'd pick Prizm for both, but we won't get Prizm in football until after the season is over.  I'll probably go back and do Score for football since it is a reasonable get and has a decent checklist.   For the NBA, I'm going with Hoops.  These are the Iowa Connections in 2021-22 Hoops: #51 Monte Morris : Iowa State #78 Harrison Barnes : Ames #108 Tyrese Haliburton - Iowa State #193 Doug McDermott - Ames #245 Joe Wieskamp - Iowa #250 Luka Garza - Iowa Notable exceptions include Nick Nurse (UNI), Talen Horton Tucker (Iowa State) and Tyler Cook (Iowa).  

 I think I have finished updating TCDB with my Iowa Connections for basketball now.  I say "I think" because I am constantly finding things I missed, and just writing this I remembered I need to look up Caitlin Clark ....... back, she's not in there yet.  I know I've seen the Sports Illustrated for Kids card online, but it has not made it to the database yet. Basketball Iowa Connections will fall under four categories...mostly.  There are some foreign league cards, 3x3 league cards, etc. that are scattered in here as well.  NBA players (Harrison Barnes, John Koncak, etc), WNBA players (Bridget Carlton, Michelle Edwards, etc),CBA players ( Nate Erdmann, Roy Marble, etc) and college basketball players and coaches (Lute Olsen, etc) make up a majority of the collection. I have 213 Iowa Connections currently in my spreadsheet, and of the 213, 171 of them have at least one card tracked in TCDB.  Ali Farokhmanesh is tracked in Beckett because of his Sports Illustr...