Back Stories: With Arms Wide Op...Sven

"As an extremely talented defenseman who is seldom caught out of position, Sven's style of play is reminiscent of NHL great Larry Robinson. Possessing both superb skating skills and a long reach, Sven was undeniably a steal as the third pick of the Pittsburgh Penguins in this years NHL entry draft. Undeniably, Butenschon's outstanding talent gives him a great future in the Penguin organization"

Whew! By today's hockey card standards, that's a lot to be printed on the back of a card. But it's true. The Penguins did have high hopes for the Itzehoe, Germany/Winnipeg d-man. He was drafted 57th overall in 1994, played two more seasons with the Brandon Wheat Kings and then played another year on the Penguins AHL team, the Cleveland Lumberjacks. 

Problem is that when you have such high praise and expectation, rarely does it work out. Especially for defenseman. He appeared in all of 33 games with Pens over the better part of five seasons and was really only ever an injury call up. He never recorded more than 17 games in one NHL season for the Pens, with his best performance in the organization coming in Wilkes-Barre in 1999-00, where he picked up 19 goals and 40 points. That got him the "A" for the following season. He was eventually traded to the Oilers (for Dan LaCouture), who then dealt him to the Islanders in 2002.  All in all, from a longevity standpoint, he has over 800 games under his belt between the AHL, NHL and DEL.

These four cards came in the same #mailday package which is both weird (that someone would have four together), and awesome at the same time. These are from the 1994 Signature Rookies Tetrad set. That was a multi-sport set that Signature Rookies put out and sold both retail and hobby. Each pack had six cards and there was one autograph in every pack. Back then, that was crazy considering other manufacturers were only getting into the infant stages of regularly putting autographs in products. 

The base set of these had a print run of 45,000 and were all Roman Numeral numbering up to 118, or I suppose, CXVII. High numbers included the Titans subset (#'d to 10,000), 119-130 and the Top Prospects subset (#'d to 20,000), #131-134. Sven here is number CIV in the auto set and these are hand numbered out of 7,750. The "7,750" is actually printed in gold foil while each card has it's number written in blue ink along with the signature.

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