...That's it. We sorta penalize WWII players, due to weak competition. Playing 24 games a year against AHL teams + sizeable part of the playoffs -- and for the Norris teams, it was really all the games, minus the beating against a Connie Smythe team -- will always raise some doubts, especially when talking about an offensive center which doesn't bring much as far as defense is concerned.
I must be missing the point of this...you're not actually comparing the 80's Norris Division to the war years, are you? I dunno, but it seems like you're trying to discount the scoring acievements of the forwards who are picked from this set, which would be most specifically (off the top of my head...I'm sure there are others) Steve Yzerman, Bernie Federko, the Chicago Party Line, Rick Vaive, and Bellows/Broten/Ciccarelli in Minnesota. A few points should be made here:
1) It was called the Bore Us Norris because it was generally weak, and specifically weak in terms of scoring,
not because the Norris division teams of this era were giving away goals.
2) It was the offenses that were particularly bad, hence the boring label. If you look over the league scoring tables from this period, you'll find that the Norris was consistently the worst division in the NHL in terms of total goals for. For a Norris Division team to crack 300 goals in a season in this period was a real achievement. If any players from the 80's Norris should be discounted, it certainly isn't the forwards.
3) Teams in this era played their division rivals 8 times each per season. In the Norris, this meant that 32 out of the 80 games were interdivisional matchups. Calling that "really all the games" is very misleading.
4) The forwards in the Norris still had to compete with the rest of the league forwards for trophies, all-star nods, places in the top-10 scoring tables, etc. - and this was arguably the highest competitive era in NHL history. We discount achievements in the war years because they came against a grossly weakened field. That's not the case for the stars of the Norris, who had to fight for their meat against a full-strength league in an era of tremendous scoring competition. If the entire NHL had consisted of just the Norris Division during this era,
then we could compare it to the war years. The reality is something rather different.
I realize the statement you made was probably hyperbole and not meant to be taken literally, but I still think a good deal of clarification was needed. Sorry if I have misinterpreted the point you were trying to make.
edit: full season was 80 rather than 82 games in this era
