2017-18 Contenders

• G-001 BASE SET SIZE CONVENTION DIVERGENCE, RECORDED RATHER THAN RESOLVED SILENTLY. This build applies EXTRACTION_SPEC section 5.3 as written: cards 101-145 of the tcdb parent checklist (sid 166725) are an autograph block flagged "AU, SN125, VAR: Vertical" / "AU, SN75, VAR: Horizontal", they sit past the base run, and they are EXCLUDED, so base_set_size = 100. Two releases already in this repo take the opposite convention for the same line: data/contenders-bkb-2019-20/release.csv sets base_set_size=165 and data/contenders-bkb-2021-22/release.csv sets base_set_size=165, both including the rookie autograph numbering in the base set; data/contenders-bkb-2018-19, 2020-21, 2022-23 and 2023-24 all set 100. Outside the repo, sportscardchecklist.com indexes this release's ticket tiers at 145 cards each ("2017-18 Panini Contenders Season Ticket (145 Cards)", "...Playoff Ticket (145 Cards)") at https://www.sportscardchecklist.com/sport-basketball/year-2017-18/index-panini-contenders/trading-card-checklists-and-product-information , i.e. the include convention, while cardboardconnection splits them into "Base Season Ticket Set Checklist / 100 cards." plus two 45-card rookie sections at https://www.cardboardconnection.com/2017-18-panini-contenders-basketball-nba-cards . Nothing on a release row tells a consumer which convention it is under. Repair is a catalogue-wide decision, not a per-release one.
• G-002 2017-18 IS NOT THIS LINE'S FLOOR AND THE DEPTH OF THE GAP BELOW IT IS UNRESOLVED. cardboardconnection states "Although it's been a few years since the brand released a full NBA product, 2017-18 Panini Contenders Basketball returns just in time for the hoopla centered around the 2017 rookie class." (https://www.cardboardconnection.com/2017-18-panini-contenders-basketball-nba-cards). Panini Contenders Basketball is absent from tcdb's 2016-17 season index, so the immediately preceding season did not ship, but no source consulted here states which season did. The predecessor was deliberately not chased in this build. data/ currently starts the line at this release.
• G-003 FIVE AUTOGRAPH SETS HAVE A PER-CARD VARIABLE SERIAL RUN AND sets.csv CANNOT CARRY IT. Distinct serial token sets enumerated across every rendered row of each set page, not sampled: Historic Rookie Season Ticket (sid 168719) SN49 x6 + SN99 x2 over 8 rows; Legendary Contenders Autographs (sid 168715) SN99 x9 + SN49 x7 + SN25 x2 + SN10 x2 over 20 rows; MVP Contenders Autographs (sid 168704) SN25 x6 + SN10 x2 + SN49 x1 over 9 rows; NBA Ink (sid 168700) SN199 x15 + SN25 x10 + SN99 x6 + SN49 x5 + SN10 x1 over 36 rows; Up and Coming Autographs (sid 168672) SN199 x17 + SN99 x7 + SN149 x1 + SN10 x1 over 25 rows. EXTRACTION_SPEC section 2.2 forbids putting a print run in card_count and sets.csv has no print_run column, so the census lives in each set's notes and here. Writing the modal token on any of the five would have been a confident false value on between 22 and 58 per cent of that set's cards.
• G-004 TWO PARALLEL TIERS ARE PROVABLY SERIAL NUMBERED WITH A PER-CARD VARIABLE RUN, A STATE THE SCHEMA CANNOT EXPRESS. Historic Rookie Playoff Ticket (sid 168721): 8 of 8 rows carry "AU"; serial tokens are SN49 on 2 rows, SN25 on 4 rows, and 2 rows carry no serial token. Historic Rookie The Finals Ticket (sid 168722): 8 of 8 rows carry "AU"; SN20 on 7 rows and SN25 on 1. print_run and serial_numbered move together and there is no print_run_basis column, so both rows are written UNKNOWN/UNKNOWN, which is indistinguishable from "nothing was found". Something WAS found and it is recorded here and in each row's visual_notes. Both rows are set-scope, so the database constraint unknown_run_only_when_scoped is satisfied.
• G-005 Historic Rookie Championship Ticket (sid 168725) states "Total Cards: 8" and rendered only 7 rows on https://www.tcdb.com/ViewSet.cfm/sid/168725/2017-18-Panini-Contenders-Historic-Rookie-Championship-Ticket . The eighth row was not recovered. The print run written (1, from SN1 on all 7 rendered rows) is unaffected in substance but rests on 7 of 8 rows rather than 8 of 8.
• G-006 THREE card_count DISAGREEMENTS BETWEEN SOURCES, EACH RESOLVED THE SAME WAY AND EACH WORTH RE-CHECKING. NBA Ink: tcdb base page (sid 168700) states and renders 36, sportscardchecklist says 36, cardboardconnection says 39, and tcdb's OWN Platinum tier (sid 168703) states and renders 39. Up and Coming Autographs: tcdb base page (sid 168672) states and renders 25, sportscardchecklist says 25, cardboardconnection says 30, and tcdb's own Platinum tier (sid 168675) states and renders 30. Rookie Season Ticket Retail: tcdb base page (sid 168749) states and renders 58, sportscardchecklist says 57, cardboardconnection says 60, and tcdb's own Championship Edition tier (sid 168750) states and renders 60. In all three the larger figure was written, because the scarcest parallel page is the more complete one and an independent editorial source agrees with it. Note that sportscardchecklist matches tcdb's RENDERED count exactly in all three cases, which is the documented shared-upstream pattern and means those are not two independent opinions. Sources: https://www.cardboardconnection.com/2017-18-panini-contenders-basketball-nba-cards ; https://www.sportscardchecklist.com/sport-basketball/year-2017-18/index-panini-contenders/trading-card-checklists-and-product-information .
• G-007 EXCHANGE / REDEMPTION ROWS ARE PRESENT AND ARE RECORDED RATHER THAN DROPPED. tcdb renders the literal token "EXCH" on one row of MVP Contenders Autographs (sid 168704), one row of MVP Contenders Autographs Platinum (sid 168707), and one row of Rookie Game Ticket Retail (sid 168748, ST-DSJ Dennis Smith Jr.). These convert an unresolved placeholder into evidenced absence from packs. Card-level rows are out of scope for this pass.
• G-008 MODELLING CALL THAT COULD GO THE OTHER WAY: Rookie Game Ticket Retail (tcdb sid 168748, 59 rows, every row "AU, SN25") is recorded here as a PARALLEL of the Rookie Season Ticket Retail set, because it carries the same ST- lettered card-code roster (ST-ACR ... ST-ZQI) as sid 168749 and a parallel's checklist is not a distinct set. Against that reading: tcdb files it under its "Insert Sets" heading rather than its "Parallel Sets" heading, and cardboardconnection gives it its own section heading "Rookie Game Ticket Retail Set Checklist / 59 cards." (https://www.cardboardconnection.com/2017-18-panini-contenders-basketball-nba-cards). Separately, sportscardchecklist lists a tier this build could not match to any tcdb sid at all - "2017-18 Panini Contenders Rookie Season Ticket Retail Autographs Cracked Ice (59 Cards)" (https://www.sportscardchecklist.com/sport-basketball/year-2017-18/index-panini-contenders/trading-card-checklists-and-product-information) - whose 59-card size equals this tier's, so the two may be one thing under two names. Unresolved.
• G-009 NO PARALLEL IN THIS RELEASE CARRIES A SOURCED CHANNEL. 73 of 79 parallel rows have channel=UNKNOWN with an empty channel_basis, which is the schema saying there is no channel for a basis to describe. The six that do carry one are channel=retail with channel_basis=from-name: their own tcdb page headings contain the word "Retail" (Front Row Seats Retail, Lottery Ticket Retail, Rookie of the Year Contenders Retail, Superstar Die Cuts Retail, Rookie Season Ticket Retail Championship Edition, Rookie Game Ticket Retail). That is a name, not a citation, and it must not be promoted without new evidence. No source consulted states hobby-exclusivity or retail-exclusivity for any individual tier; cardboardconnection gives only a product-level hobby configuration ("10 cards per pack, 12 packs per box, 12 boxes per case") at https://www.cardboardconnection.com/2017-18-panini-contenders-basketball-nba-cards , which this build declined to inherit onto tiers it does not cover.
• G-010 checklistcenter.com COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR THIS RELEASE AND NO ABSENCE IS CLAIMED. Two differently phrased site-scoped searches returned checklistcenter pages for 2017-18 Impeccable, Opulence, Noir, Spectra, National Treasures, Immaculate and Contenders DRAFT PICKS, but none for 2017-18 Panini Contenders basketball. Per reference/caveats.csv CAV-037 its slugs are irregular and a constructed URL was therefore never tried; two search misses are not evidence the page does not exist. Consequence: the aggregator this catalogue usually uses as its counts source is missing here, and the count evidence rests on cardboardconnection plus sportscardchecklist.com plus tcdb.
• G-011 beckett.com was not consulted. Per reference/caveats.csv CAV-033 it has 302-redirected to a maintenance page since at least 2026-09-20 and four agents recorded it independently. The third structural source several sibling Contenders seasons leaned on is therefore unavailable, and corroboration in this release is thinner than a matching gap count in a sibling season would suggest.
• G-012 CARD-LEVEL CHECKLISTS FOR THE INSERT AND AUTOGRAPH SETS ARE NOT IN THIS PASS and insert_cards.csv was deliberately not written, per EXTRACTION_SPEC section 2 and CHASE_CHECKLIST_SPEC. Recorded for whoever runs that pass: the rookie autographs are numbered as INTEGERS 101-145 inside the parent checklist (not letter-coded), the retail rookie autographs and the Rookie Game Ticket Retail tier use ST- lettered codes (ST-ACR, ST-DSJ, ST-ZQI), and Historic Rookie Season Ticket uses HRT- codes (HRT-AD, HRT-KI). Three different numbering schemes in one release.
• G-013 THE Inserts.cfm NOTES COLUMN ON THIS PARENT CARRIES NO USABLE INFORMATION AND THE BLANK-ANNOTATION TEST WAS NOT RUN. https://www.tcdb.com/Inserts.cfm/sid/166725/2017-18-Panini-Contenders renders a Notes column whose FORMAT is bare tokens, not prose - "SN1" and "SN25", never "Serial numbered to 25" - which is the Select shape of reference/caveats.csv CAV-036, not the Hoops prose shape. Only 4 of its 75 rows are annotated at all. The blank cells carry zero information and this is refutable within the page itself: "Front Row Seat Cracked Ice" carries "SN25" while "Hall of Fame Contenders Cracked Ice" is EMPTY, and the latter's own page (sid 168732) renders SN25 on all 20 of its rows. Every print run in this release was therefore taken from a row-level token census on the tier's own page, and no tier was written "unnumbered" off a blank Notes cell.
• G-014 COVERAGE SHORTFALL ON THREE OF THE FOUR BASE PRINTING PLATES. Season Ticket Printing Plate Black (sid 168737) had all 100 base card numbers read for their serial token (SN1 on every one). Cyan (168738), Magenta (168739) and Yellow (168740) were read over cards 1-76, 1-74 and a 40-row render spanning 1-76 respectively, plus Gallery pages 9 and 10 (cards 81-100); cards roughly 75-80 were not separately read on those three sids. Every row that WAS read carries SN1, the fully enumerated sibling plate carries SN1 on all 100, and cardboardconnection states "Printing Plates 1/1" - but the enumeration is not complete on those three and that is stated rather than glossed.
• G-015 THE HORIZONTAL ROOKIE LADDER IS SINGLE-SOURCED TO tcdb. cardboardconnection prints a ticket-parallel ladder for the vertical rookie set ("Playoff #/65, The Finals #/49, Cracked Ice #/25, Premium Edition Gold #/10, Championship 1/1, Printing Plates 1/1") and prints NO ladder for the horizontal variation set (https://www.cardboardconnection.com/2017-18-panini-contenders-basketball-nba-cards). The horizontal figures written here (Playoff 35, The Finals 25, Cracked Ice 20) come only from tcdb flag tokens. The orientation-to-run mapping is itself sourced rather than inferred - https://www.tcdb.com/Checklist.cfm/sid/168745/2017-18-Panini-Contenders-Playoff-Ticket?PageIndex=2&sort=0 renders "AU, SN65 VAR: Vertical" and "AU, SN35 VAR: Horizontal" on cards 101, 105 and 113 - but the values themselves rest on one source.
• G-016 rookie_flag is UNKNOWN on all 100 base cards. tcdb renders no RC designation on any row of the 1-100 base run on Checklist.cfm page 1 or on Gallery.cfm pages 9 and 10, and no other source consulted prints RC flags for this set. Per reference/caveats.csv CAV-003 this is the normal state for Panini releases. Note the 2017 rookie class is NOT in the 1-100 base run at all - it sits in the excluded 101-145 autograph block - so the base run is veterans, which is consistent with an absence of RC flags but does not source it.
• G-017 SECTION 5.5 MIRROR CHECKED AND NEGATIVE. tcdb files no prior-season subset under this parent: all 75 rows of https://www.tcdb.com/Inserts.cfm/sid/166725/2017-18-Panini-Contenders are 2017-18 Contenders sets, and no Update block of any season appears. The base run 1-100 is contiguous with no unissued interior number, so the reverse mirror - a 2017-18 card hiding in the NEXT season's parent - has no missing number to explain. That reverse direction was checked only against this repo's own data/contenders-bkb-2018-19 build, whose sets.csv carries a "2018-19 Panini Contenders Update I" row and nothing labelled 2017-18; the 2018-19 parent sid was not re-fetched in this build.
• G-018 SID BLOCK COMPLETENESS IS BOUNDED, NOT PROVED EXHAUSTIVE. Inserts.cfm returned 75 rows in a single fetch with no truncation, spanning sids 168669-168750. Both boundaries were proved foreign by probe - 168668 is "2017-18 Panini Prestige - Crystal Blue" and 168751 is "1979 J.D. McCarthy Toronto Blue Jays Photocards" - and all seven interior gaps were probed and are foreign: 168676 is "2001-02 Merlin Premier League Stickers" and 168677, 168678, 168679, 168684, 168685 and 168686 are all 2017-18 Panini PRESTIGE sets (Micro Etch Rookies and its colour tiers). A different product is therefore interleaved inside this product's sid block. What is NOT proved: that no Contenders subset sits in some other sid neighbourhood entirely, the failure mode measured on 2017-18 National Treasures where 25 of 142 rows sat in eight outside neighbourhoods. Nothing in the enumeration suggests a missing set - every named tier from cardboardconnection and sportscardchecklist maps to a listed sid - but no sweep outside the block was run.

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