In 2003, LEGO added a Basketball subtheme to the Sports theme. Basketball introduced minifigs with new specialized single-piece arms made to hold basketballs, and specialized spring-loaded legs made to let you tilt them back so that they would throw said basketballs. Unfortunately, I've not yet been able to experience for myself how well this worked, but I'll get back to that. As part of Basketball, Lego released the NBA Collectors series of minifigure three-packs. The minifigures in these packs bore the likeness of real-life basketball players, down to the skin tone - the first example of a licensed series of sets unilaterally requiring flesh tones (and in a far greater variety). As with other three-packs of this era, the sets also contained three of the then-standard 6x6 display base with a slot for a backdrop card (in tan), and three cards. In this case, the cards were not display backdrops per se but rather Lego-branded collectible cards of the included players. These were meant as a fun way to expand rosters, and to draw in NBA fans.

This particular pack contains:

Vince Carter

Dirk Nowitzki

and Gary Payton.

All three minifigures are reasonable LEGO representations of the players in question. However, the image choice for Dirk's card is a bit questionable in my opinion: It shows him in the Mavericks' Home jersey, while the actual figure is based on the Away jersey.

My main complaint, however, is something this pack and its brethren did not contain:

A basketball.

The NBA Collectors packs did not contain even a single basketball for the players within to hold and throw (much less a hoop). This is a problem, in my opinion: you have these minifigures that are specialized towards this one gimmick, but not even one ball to actually make use of said gimmick. It's less of a problem if you have other basketball sets... but I didn't (and even for those who did, I imagine it would have been nice to get spare balls via these packs). I was gifted this pack, but that was it. I never got any of the basketball sets other than this one pack, so I have never been able to enjoy my basketball figures properly and can't gauge how well they do what they were made form. I made makeshift balls on occasion, but that's not the same.

And that lack of a ball means that on their own, these packs are basically good only for display or collecting the cards. If they'd had so much as one ball, they'd have been great mini-starters for the theme all on their own. But as it is... unless you already have Lego basketballs, there's not much reason to get these if you're not a diehard NBA collector.

these minifigs were the first to come with the flesh skin colour, which is different from the light flesh colour you have in hp, sw or spider-man sets. that makes them quite useless, provided you are no baskestball-fan or you prefer the standard yellow skin colour.
sorted all garbage out, all that remains are 3 very pretty printed torsos, 2 brown heads and 1 blond hair-piece. so don't worry if you miss this set.

This set has 3 minifigs, which are famous basketball players. The 3 famous basketball players are: Vince Carter, Gary Payton and Dirk Nowitzki. We also get a card and a stand for those figures. This set may doesn't have any play features, but it still has a good collector's value. This is a good set to have, but I would still recommend you to get the bigger sets of this theme first before you get this one.

All in all, this set is a good set and I would recommend you to get it. You can find this set on eBay and BrickLink for sure. Here is the link where you can check out the full gallery I made for this set on my website: www.klokriecher.de


Videos I made of this set:

Stopmotion 1

Stopmotion 2

Review

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