1985 Star Coaches

October 20, 2026

#1 John Bach (raw)

For sale from this set

1985 Star Coaches #1 John Bach NM to NM-MT — #1 John Bach NM to NM-MT
$9.95 · Buy now

1985 Star Coaches #3 Cotton Fitzsimmons NM to NM-MT — #3 Cotton Fitzsimmons NM to NM-MT
$9.95 · Buy now

1985 Star Coaches #4 Kevin Loughery NM to NM-MT — #4 Kevin Loughery NM to NM-MT
$9.95 · Buy now

1985 Star Coaches #5 John MacLeod NM to NM-MT — #5 John MacLeod NM to NM-MT
$9.95 · Buy now

1985 Star Coaches #6 Doug Moe NM to NM-MT — #6 Doug Moe NM to NM-MT
$9.95 · Buy now

1985 Star Coaches #8 Jack Ramsay NM to NM-MT — #8 Jack Ramsay NM to NM-MT
$9.95 · Buy now

The 1985 Star Coaches set has 10 cards, one for each of ten NBA head coaches of the 1984-85 season. starbasketballcards.com calls it "one of Star's more forgettable sets," but it is a who's who of the era's benches: six of the ten men are now in the Naismith Hall of Fame, and the Bulls card is Kevin Loughery, Michael Jordan's coach in his rookie year.

The set at a glance

Cards	10
Numbering	Listed 1-10 in alphabetical order; TCDB lists the cards as unnumbered
Released	1985
Sets printed (est.)	5,000 (Basketball Gold and starbasketballcards.com)
Errors and variations	Wilkens misspelled "Wilkins" on the back; Riley and Wilkens each found with blue or purple backs

Card by card

#	Coach	Team (1984-85)
1	John Bach	Golden State Warriors
2	Hubie Brown	New York Knicks
3	Cotton Fitzsimmons	San Antonio Spurs
4	Kevin Loughery	Chicago Bulls
5	John MacLeod	Phoenix Suns
6	Doug Moe	Denver Nuggets
7	Don Nelson	Milwaukee Bucks
8	Jack Ramsay	Portland Trail Blazers
9	Pat Riley	Los Angeles Lakers
10	Lenny Wilkens	Seattle SuperSonics

All ten were sitting head coaches in 1984-85. John Bach, later remembered as a Bulls assistant, appears here as the Warriors' head coach, a job he held from 1983 to 1986.

How the set was made

Star, Robert Levin's small Pennsylvania company, held the NBA license from 1983 to 1986 and sold most of its cards in sealed polybags, one team or subset per bag. The Coaches set was one of Star's 1985 specialty subsets. Basketball Gold records that the Last 11 Rookies of the Year, the All-Rookie Team, the Kareem set and the Coaches were all printed on the same sheet as Star's Dale Murphy and Rod Carew baseball sets; the uncut sheet in the gallery below shows that layout.

Basketball Gold and starbasketballcards.com both estimate 5,000 sets, the same figure Basketball Gold gives for the other subsets on that sheet. No source we found says exactly how the Coaches set was sold.

What collectors should know

The Wilkens error: Lenny Wilkens' last name is misspelled "Wilkins" on the back of his card (TCDB and starbasketballcards.com).
Purple backs: the Riley and Wilkens cards are each found with a blue back or a purple back. A TCDB user note ties the purple to the Kareem set, which shared rows with those two cards on the uncut sheet; no published source confirms why.
Fakes: it is not one of the Type II sets (those are limited to 1985-86 #95-172, the 1986 Jordan set and 1986 Best of the New), and it was not among the ten sets remade for Shop at Home in 1997, though its sheet-mates the Last 11 ROYs and All-Rookies were.
Grading: BGS has graded Star since December 2008, subsets included. PSA added "1985 Star Coaches" to its eligible sets in March 2023. CGC began grading 1980s Star in May 2025; its announcement publishes no set list.

The key cards

#9 Pat Riley: the key card according to Sports Collectors Daily and starbasketballcards.com; Riley went into the Hall of Fame as a coach in 2008.
#10 Lenny Wilkens: the error card; Wilkens is in the Hall of Fame both as a player (1989) and as a coach (1998).
#4 Kevin Loughery: Michael Jordan's first NBA coach, on a Bulls card.
Hall of Famers: Riley, Wilkens, Jack Ramsay, Don Nelson, Hubie Brown and Cotton Fitzsimmons are all enshrined in Springfield (Brown as a contributor).