1966-67 Topps Bobby Orr #35 RC

Hockey on a television screen

Topps built its 1966-67 hockey set around a television. Each card frames the player inside a wood-grain TV cabinet, a design the company also used for its 1966 football set, perhaps to cut costs. The set has 132 cards, and the backs are printed in both English and French.

Orr landed early in the numbering, at #35 in the first series. The first series also included Gump Worsley, Henri Richard, Terry Sawchuk, Stan Mikita and Phil Esposito; the second brought Jean Beliveau, Gordie Howe and Bobby Hull plus a run of All-Star cards, #121 to #132.

Hockey cards were made in far smaller quantities than baseball cards in the mid-1960s. A 2019 report noted that PSA had graded 7,448 copies of Mickey Mantle's 1966 Topps baseball card against just 687 of the Orr rookie at the time.

The rookie who changed defense

Robert Gordon Orr was born March 20, 1948, in Parry Sound, Ontario. The Bruins had been watching him since he was 14, and he developed with their junior affiliate, the Oshawa Generals. His father had wanted him to play forward; a boyhood coach made him a defenseman who attacked.

He debuted on October 19, 1966, at 18. In 61 games that season he scored 13 goals and 41 points with 102 penalty minutes, won the Calder Trophy as the league's top rookie and made the Second All-Star Team. Boston still missed the playoffs, the last time it would do so for 29 seasons.

What followed rewrote the position. Orr won eight straight Norris Trophies from 1968 to 1975, three Hart Trophies and, as a defenseman, two Art Ross Trophies as the league's leading scorer. In 1970-71 he set records for a defenseman with 102 assists and 139 points and was a plus-124. He won the Stanley Cup and the Conn Smythe Trophy in 1970 and 1972.

His career lasted only 12 seasons and 657 games, with Boston and finally Chicago, with 270 goals and 915 points. He entered the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1979, the youngest inductee at the time.

The last Original Six season

The 1966-67 season was the NHL's 50th and the last with only six teams, each playing 70 games. Expansion to 12 teams had already been approved for the next season. Chicago's Stan Mikita led the league with 97 points, and Toronto beat Montreal four games to two in the final, which ended May 2, 1967. It remains the Maple Leafs' last Stanley Cup.

Topps also tested the American market that year with a separate 66-card USA Test set, printed with lighter borders and English-only backs, in the season before the league expanded into new U.S. cities. The regular Orr turns up in PSA holders slightly more than seven times as often as the Test Orr.

From $7,500 to $69,900

The Orr rookie is reasonably easy to find in EX to EX-MT condition, but PSA 8 copies cost real money and their price has climbed steeply. A collector quoted in 2016 said PSA 8s had sold for around $7,500 a few months earlier and were going for over $20,000 by then.

One tracker of card sales lists PSA 8 results of $35,100 on November 22, 2015, and $44,544.44 on October 27, 2019, both copies singled out for above-average eye appeal. In 2019 a magazine report valued a standard PSA 8 at about $32,000. The same tracker recorded a PSA 8 sale at $69,900 on September 17, 2026, the most recent at the time of writing; PSA's own sales records list a most recent PSA 8 price of $42,000.

The scarcer USA Test card is a separate market. The only PSA 9 Test Orr sold at auction for $204,000 in early 2019, then the second highest price for any hockey card at public auction.

Identifying a sharp copy

The regular card has darker wood-grain borders and a bilingual English and French back. The USA Test version has lighter wood grain, an English-only back, and often a white stripe along the right edge of the front.

Like the 1955 Bowman baseball set, the 1966 Topps hockey cards are surrounded by brown borders that show every chip. For a card to be centered top to bottom, there should be some room between Orr's name and the bottom border. Those two problems are why only 49 copies have reached PSA 8 or better.

The numbers

1966-67 season (rookie)

61 GP, 13 G, 28 A, 41 PTS, +1, 102 PIM. Calder Trophy; Second All-Star Team. Age 18.

1969-70

76 GP, 33 G, 87 A, 120 PTS, +54; Stanley Cup

1970-71

78 GP, 37 G, 102 A, 139 PTS, +124 (defenseman records for assists and points)

Career (12 seasons)

657 GP, 270 G, 645 A, 915 PTS, 953 PIM

Honors

8 Norris, 3 Hart, 2 Art Ross, 2 Conn Smythe, 1 Calder; 2 Stanley Cups

Hall of Fame

Inducted 1979

Timeline

1. Mar 20, 1948

   Bobby Orr is born in Parry Sound, Ontario.

2. 1966

   Topps issues its 132-card 1966-67 hockey set, with Orr as #35, and a separate 66-card USA Test set.

3. Oct 19, 1966

   Orr makes his NHL debut for Boston at 18.

4. May 2, 1967

   Toronto wins the Stanley Cup in the last season of the Original Six.

5. 1967

   Orr wins the Calder Trophy as the NHL's top rookie.

6. 1968

   Orr wins the first of eight straight Norris Trophies.

7. 1970

   Orr wins the Stanley Cup and the Conn Smythe Trophy.

8. 1971

   Orr sets defenseman records with 102 assists and 139 points in 1970-71.

9. 1972

   Orr wins his second Stanley Cup and Conn Smythe Trophy.

10. 1979

    Orr becomes the youngest Hockey Hall of Fame inductee to that time.

11. Nov 22, 2015

    A PSA 8 copy sells for $35,100.

12. 2019

    The only PSA 9 USA Test Orr sells at auction for $204,000.

13. Oct 27, 2019

    A PSA 8 copy sells for $44,544.44.

14. Sep 17, 2026

    A PSA 8 copy sells for $69,900.

The world in 1966

• Oct 6, 1966

  LSD becomes illegal in the United States.

• Oct 9, 1966

  The Baltimore Orioles sweep the Los Angeles Dodgers to win their first World Series.

• Oct 21, 1966

  Congress approves the merger of the American Football League and the National Football League.

• Nov 8, 1966

  Edward Brooke becomes the first African American elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction.

• Dec 15, 1966

  Walt Disney dies while The Jungle Book is in production.

• Dec 18, 1966

  How the Grinch Stole Christmas airs for the first time on CBS.

Price record

A realized auction price is what a buyer actually paid on the date shown, including the buyer's premium where the sale reported it. It is the strongest kind of reference price, and it is a record of one sale of one object on one day, not a promise of what the next example will bring.

By reference price, 1966-67 Topps Bobby Orr #35 RC is number 42 of 100 in the trading cards entries of the FLOAT 100. 97 of those 100 rest on a realized sale; the rest carry an asking price or a guide value, and each page says which. Rank within the FLOAT 100 itself (68 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• Topps used the same wood-grain television design for its 1966 football cards.
• Orr won the NHL scoring title twice while playing defense.
• Orr's rookie season in Boston ended without a playoff berth, the last time the Bruins missed for 29 straight seasons.
• The regular-issue card's back is bilingual; the rarer USA Test version is printed in English only.
• Orr's plus-124 in 1970-71 set a record.
• Toronto won the Cup the season this card came out and has not won it since.