The lockout...well, the first one anyway. I wouldn't figure it out until later but it's in this season when the hobby changed and became something that I didn't enjoy, a slow, evolutionary process.

98-99 saw the season shortened to 50 games, and many of the card sets cancelled planned Series 2s. After this point eventually most of them stopped having a series 2. Serially numbering became big during this season, including SPx, named SPx Finite this year, where every single card was numbered! Numbering had existed earlier- I pulled my first in the 1996-97 season- but after this point it became "the" thing to do.

Upper Deck added 4 new sets- Black Diamond, Hardcourt, Ovation and Century Legends (which is a unique set as it came out with the 98-99 cards but includes player stats from that season, the set would be retooled the following season into NBA Legends. Topps didn't add anything new, Fleer/Skybox replaced Z-Force with Thunder, and Metal Series 2 was called Molten Metal- and even included metal cards, for the first time. Fleer also introduced a 1-year only product called Brilliants, which was the first set composed entirely of plastic cards. Fleer's flagship set was renamed Fleer Tradition.