Jimmy Howard: Cardboard Cameos

Now that Jimmy Howard is retired, the likelihood of him having a lot of new cards any time soon is pretty slim. That being said, I am obviously not going to be stopping my primary player collection and will continue to focus on his existing cardboard.

The fact that he is retired also has me going back and actually looking through my box of Howard cards more often lately. After all, what's the point of having them if you're not going to pull them out of the box and enjoy them every now and then?

Anyway, after noticing the Wings backup goalie in the photo on Howard's 2021 MVP card, it got me thinking about the chance that Howard was in the background of any other Red Wings cards. That in turn made me think of the posts on My Hockey Card Obsession about Trevor Linden cameos. Click here for some examples of what I'm referring to.

Another recent example that helped inspire this post is from @creasecollector on Twitter with his Jhonas Enroth collection. Click here to check out his blog post on the subject.

For my cameo cards of Jimmy Howard, I was able to grab three as part of my latest COMC order. I've been slowly building a want list for these as I stumble upon them and the price was just right so I had to have them for this neat little side project.

Up first is my favorite of the three, a UD Canvas card of Mike Green from 2018-19 Upper Deck. This one has a cool shot of some action in front of the Red Wings net in what appears to be Nationwide Arena. Definitely easy to see it is Howard in goal.

Up next is another card from the same set, this time featuring William Nylander of the Toronto Maple Leafs. This one once again shows Howard in net, this time in the foreground at Scotia Bank Arena. This one is neat because all you see is Howard and one other player.

For the last of the three, we circle back to Mike Green. This time we have a base card from 2018-19 Upper Deck. You can clearly see Howard is the goalie behind Green, although his head is almost hidden by the Upper Deck logo in the upper right corner.

These are just some of the examples of cameo cards for Jimmy Howard. There are plenty more out there, I just need to track them down for the collection. I always like finding new and exciting ways to enjoy collecting. After all when your main PC player is retired, you've got to find something like this to keep things interesting.

As far as my Howard collection, I am not going to be counting these as part of the main collection. They will be their own separate category and I'll keep them in separate posts like this in the future. For me, that just makes it easier to keep everything organized.