Note: Awful Hockey Card Art is a periodic and not-so-Islanders-related summer series that commemorates the time before Photoshop, when hockey card designers got a little too carried away and we kids had to deal with the sorry results.

This is Glenn "Chico" Resch, the Stanley Cup-winning former Islander. He was actually a New Jersey Devil when this photo was taken during the 1985-86 season, but that sure isn't a Devils uniform they have him dressed up in. He was traded to the Flyers late that year -- the same year Pelle Lindbergh died -- but no doubt Topps/O-Pee-Chee couldn't be bothered to get an updated photo, and apparently slapping "Now With Team X" was reserved only for special cases like Clark Gillies (Would you dare paint on Gillies? Didn't think so.), presumably when the in-house MS Paint expert was busy.

No, the card companies had a different, brilliant solution: We'll just draw his new uniform on! Worse, we'll ignore that by this point the Flyers had gone to a black trim line between the white and orange (a detail I always liked)! So Resch is depicted in a kindergartner's rendition of a uniform he never wore. None of which, sadly, distracts from that epic hair, which we cannot pin (can we?) on OPC's art department.

As for why this future Devils color man looks like Random Philly Joe in an orange t-shirt instead of an athletic goalie: The majority of hockey card shots in those days were snapped during warmups. So while sometimes they'd play off a guy skating drills as if he was doing something noteworthy in action, goalies were constantly shot in this way, with just a maskless portrait and a vacant scowl. Pat Riggin as a Capital and Don Beaupre as a North Star come to mind from this era: Goalies photographed ... doing nothing, looking unhappy. (Who can forget this version of Kelly Hrudey?) Totally unsatisfying for the kid who wanted to see a goalie making a kick save, mask on.

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First, let's get this out of the way: I hated Pat Verbeek.

"Little Ball of Hate" is a cute nickname if you're a guard dog at Wal-Mart, maybe. Some kind of yappy chihuahua a spoiled celebrity carries in her purse. But for a hockey player? Kind of pathetic. Just sounds like a cheapshot tool with a temper. The kind of guy who would take a two-handed baseball slash to the back of the Lady Byng-like Pierre Turgeon's knee in the 1999 playoffs (Stars vs. Blues). That was Verbeek. [And trust me, that happened.]

Come to think of it, maybe that incident was Verbeek's way of executing a little ball of bitter vengeance at being traded by New Jersey for Pierre's brother Sylvain a decade earlier. In addition to frequent cheap shots, little balls of hate probably hold nonsensical grudges, too.

But anyway, this is about hockey cards, and the hilarious efforts to paint traded players in their new uniforms rather than going with the old "NOW WITH WHALERS" workaround.

Verbeek's first card for the Whalers was one of those cheap close-up paint-over jobs. Having been dealt by the Devils to the Whalers over the summer, his 1989-90 Topps card showed his little ball of helmet colored green -- but still CCM, mind you -- while they colored a little ball of green jersey on his shoulders, a white collar, and just the very tip-top white of the Whaler tail.

As regrettable little balls of pre-Photoshop jobs go, this one was actually passable. Certainly less noticeable -- if less ambitious -- than the Randy Cunneyworth epic from the same year. They did a lot of these close-up shortcuts, presumably because they were easy, the way ESPN -- does that network still exist? -- immediately slaps the image of a new hat on the head of a baseball player who signs with a new team. (Why the Orwellian rush to alter history? I don't know.) I'll never get why they didn't just leave the original image alone: Players get traded, big whoop. For some reason they had to act like they were pulling a fast one.

Kind of like Verbeek, every time he snuck a cheapshot in while the ref wasn't looking.

In the last two episodes of Awful Hockey Card Art, I mentioned how even the most expertly drawn crest can still look blindingly awful when it's slapped on a horribly painted "uniform."

You know what else can mess up a half-way decent logo rendition? If you over compensate for a player's faceoff lean by turning the logo a full 90 degrees. I've no idea if the people behind Warren Young's 86-87 O-Pee-Chee card just didn't understand basic physics, or if they honestly thought that the Penguins logo is a flightless fowl "running" on skates on his way to spear someone like Marty McSorley on Mike Bullard.

Either way, that is just the beginning of the disaster of this card. After one year in Detroit, Young was traded back to Pittsburgh, so the neolithic pre-Photoshop painters decided to paint him up in black and gold. The results, and the attempts at stripes that contour to the body, are epic. That little squiggly line around the waist reflects a particular level of desperation in the artists: "Well, it's all black top and bottom, but we have to make some separation between jersey and pants, so ... just kinda make this line curve somewhere. But try not to touch the Penguin's elbow on the logo."

After the jump: A storied former Islander gets abused in Philly, and a legendary Bruin receives the "just draw a line on there somewhere" treatment.

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In introducing this Awful Hockey Card Art series, we featured the distinguished 1989-90 Topps card of one Randy Cunneyworth, whose Winnipeg Jets "uniform" was carefully painted on after his off-season trade by the Penguins. I mentioned how difficult to draw that arched, funky-fonted "WINNIPEG" was in their logo.

You know what else was maddeningly difficult to get right for a child hack artist such as myself? The Red Wings logo. So, naturally the Hockey Card Painters went for it that year, with Marc Habscheid, who was acquired from the Minnesota North Stars in the offseason.

(Yes, Minnesota's NHL team used to be the NORTH Stars ... and hockey cards used to come with dry, tasteless chewing gum. Also: Not everyone knew Tom Cruise was batsh--THIS COMMENT HAS BEEN DELETED BY THE CHURCH OF SCIEN--NO, THIS COMMENT NEVER EXISTED. CARRY ON.)

Again, why all the photo-altering effort for a journeyman? Is it because you can get away with your most experimental work on the anonymous guys, and not Wayne Gretzky? (After Gretzky's summer trade in 1988, rather than painting L.A. black on him -- which would've been hilariously disastrous, since they hadn't even seen that new jersey on ice -- they used a photo of him holding up the jersey at his L.A. press conference. Awesome sauce. And nice shirt.)

Anyway, as mentioned, the Red Wing wheel and feathers are a nightmare to draw. I almost thought they did some sort of transplant from another pic on to Habscheid, but if you look closely, you can see the left spokes on the wheel get into that phase where the artist goes, "And then there's some stuff over here." They don't totally meet on the left side of the wheel; they just cross in a way that hints at the artist's pending migraine.

Kudos for the placement, though. No kudos for the cheesy stick coloring and the over-the-top wrinkle shadows under each armpit and on Habscheid's belly. Someone turned the Wings jersey into a velvet drapery.

But back to that Cunneyworth card: Also involved in that trade was Andrew McBain. Since repainting Cunneyworth worked so brilliantly, you don't suppose they gave similar treatment to McBain, do you? Hmmm...

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Before there was Photoshop, there was ... something else. I don't know what it was, exactly. But it was something awful.

It got better as time went on, but depending on what era you collected hockey cards (if you are indeed from an era when a pack of cards was cheaper than a gallon of gas), then you were witness -- perhaps unwittingly -- to some god-awful cover-up jobs to depict a traded player on his new team before he actually appeared in that uniform.

This is a series I've always wanted to do. Like everything here, it will be randomly occurring without warning.

With the Jets-otes in the news, we'll start with a Jet, from a "late" era card -- a period when they could get fairly detailed with their paint-overs without creating a disaster. This is Randy Cunneyworth's Topps 1989-90 card. He was acquired by Winnipeg from Pittsburgh with Rick Tabaracci and future Islander Dave McLlwain for Jim Kyte, Andrew McBain and Randy Gilhen on June 17, 1989.

Ironically, Cunneyworth only spent 28 games in a Jets uniform before moving on to Hartford. So this was his only shot at hockey card infamy in Jets red-white-and-blue. Note that they not only went to the trouble of drawing the Jets shoulder and collar striping, they meticulously painted the Jets logo and colored gloves on him. Almost as good? They even repainted his stick, carefully printing the "H E R  W O O D" of Sher-wood on his oddly uniformly colored wood stick.

[This job is so good, you might have to click on the enlarged image to appreciate its detail. In the world of official hockey card touch-ups, they don't get much better than this -- I mean, did you ever try to draw the arched "WINNIPEG" in the Jets logo? That part alone nearly killed me as a kid.]

That's some serious effort for an NHL journeyman. You know some Topps/OPC artist put sweat and love into this work. Fortunately, it gets much, much worse, as we'll explore when we delve further into this series...