Do cups define the player?

[pacehimself]

Let me ask u this, does winning define a player? The Cup is a representation of winning.

For goalies yes...i beleive an argument can be made for a goalie stepping up throughout there career and steali wins on a regular basis for their team

 

[Captain Bowie]

I would take Trent Dilfer over Dan Marino. He plays a conservative winning game. While Marino CAN win one big game by taking big risks, he often loses it the same way. I truly believe Trent Dilfer is the most underrated quarterback in NFL history.

All that said, you can't deny the winning ability of guys like Mr. Game 7 Justin Williams and Mike Richards who has won at every single level. These guys just know how to win. And they came up huge at the right time last season. Does that mean that Colin Fraser is great because he has 3 Cups? No. But does it mean that Anze Kopitar is better than Joe Thornton? Probably. And does it mean that Jonathan Quick is better than Henrik Lundquist? Maybe.

........

*Insert not sure if serious pic here*

 

[Eisen]

Let me ask u this, does winning define a player? The Cup is a representation of winning.

In tennis it does. In a team sport it doesn't.

 

[alexny]

If it's a false binary like presented in the OP, of course it's silly. But like it or not, if a player plays a big role in those cups, it's equally silly to ignore it.

Of course Colin Fraser isn't > ...just about anybody. But when a guy like Justin Williams has three cups, you have to at least consider why. Hint: not everyone that wins a cup is carried by the rest of the team as the false binary would have you believe.

Yep. The OP is a strawman argument.

I think performing well in the playoffs is a fair point in a discussion of two SIMILAR players.

 

[NikF]

Winning of course matters. HF however builds a false reality through some mental gymnastics to deny it, this is the usual process:

The first trick of HFBoards - Play Dumb:
Falsely assume that winning is all there is to it, so you can use stupid arguments like Colin Fraser with 2 Cups and momentarily play dumb.

The second trick of HFBoards - The Shifting "Team":
Go into a polar opposite argument and deem winning as irrelevant by generalizing winning to some kind of foreign object with superpowers that exists outside of reality referred to as "the team". "The team" wins but no player actually has any contribution to it, if you bring up an individual player on that team, HFBoards will quickly shift the focus on "the team", and this happens regardless of which player you bring up, thus eliminating all and every contribution an individual player has on a winning team, he becomes successful simply by being lucky enough to be on "The Team".

The third trick of HFboards - "The Final Equation and The Swap":
Once you create an illusion of eliminating an individual's impact on a winning franchise (as achieved by applying the first and second point in this post) HF achieves its end goal. A simple over generalized and of course false equation of: perceived skill level of player A + perceived skill level of player B + C +... = total team performance.

This allows HF to falsely conclude that any player that appears superficially similar (often in point production, technical skills, or otherwise) would have achieved the very same thing a winning player did simply by swapping teams. This is known as the HF's "anti-Toews" argument (of course it can be applied to several players, but I gave it the Toews moniker since it seems to be the most common, as well as Toews' value often having the biggest gap in the minds of hockey insiders and executives and HFBoards).

 

[HOLDITHERE*]

I'm going to quote this entire thread the next time we have an Ovechkin thread.

 

[RedBaronIndian]

Winning of course matters. HF however builds a false reality through some mental gymnastics to deny it, this is the usual process:

The first trick of HFBoards - Play Dumb:
Falsely assume that winning is all there is to it, so you can use stupid arguments like Colin Fraser with 2 Cups and momentarily play dumb.

The second trick of HFBoards - The Shifting "Team":
Go into a polar opposite argument and deem winning as irrelevant by generalizing winning to some kind of foreign object with superpowers that exists outside of reality referred to as "the team". "The team" wins but no player actually has any contribution to it, if you bring up an individual player on that team, HFBoards will quickly shift the focus on "the team", and this happens regardless of which player you bring up, thus eliminating all and every contribution an individual player has on a winning team, he becomes successful simply by being lucky enough to be on "The Team".

The third trick of HFboards - "The Final Equation and The Swap":
Once you create an illusion of eliminating an individual's impact on a winning franchise (as achieved by applying the first and second point in this post) HF achieves its end goal. A simple over generalized and of course false equation of: perceived skill level of player A + perceived skill level of player B + C +... = total team performance.

This allows HF to falsely conclude that any player that appears superficially similar (often in point production, technical skills, or otherwise) would have achieved the very same thing a winning player did simply by swapping teams. This is known as the HF's "anti-Toews" argument (of course it can be applied to several players, but I gave it the Toews moniker since it seems to be the most common, as well as Toews' value often having the biggest gap in the minds of hockey insiders and executives and HFBoards).

Well put

 

[Oil80]

Six Stanley Cups

 

[Regal]

Winning of course matters. HF however builds a false reality through some mental gymnastics to deny it, this is the usual process:

The first trick of HFBoards - Play Dumb:
Falsely assume that winning is all there is to it, so you can use stupid arguments like Colin Fraser with 2 Cups and momentarily play dumb.

The second trick of HFBoards - The Shifting "Team":
Go into a polar opposite argument and deem winning as irrelevant by generalizing winning to some kind of foreign object with superpowers that exists outside of reality referred to as "the team". "The team" wins but no player actually has any contribution to it, if you bring up an individual player on that team, HFBoards will quickly shift the focus on "the team", and this happens regardless of which player you bring up, thus eliminating all and every contribution an individual player has on a winning team, he becomes successful simply by being lucky enough to be on "The Team".

The third trick of HFboards - "The Final Equation and The Swap":
Once you create an illusion of eliminating an individual's impact on a winning franchise (as achieved by applying the first and second point in this post) HF achieves its end goal. A simple over generalized and of course false equation of: perceived skill level of player A + perceived skill level of player B + C +... = total team performance.

This allows HF to falsely conclude that any player that appears superficially similar (often in point production, technical skills, or otherwise) would have achieved the very same thing a winning player did simply by swapping teams. This is known as the HF's "anti-Toews" argument (of course it can be applied to several players, but I gave it the Toews moniker since it seems to be the most common, as well as Toews' value often having the biggest gap in the minds of hockey insiders and executives and HFBoards).

I applaud you for this. Especially the "anti-Toews" argument. One of the worst arguments on here.

 

[theCOMMISH]

It takes a team to win a cup.

 

[BillDineen]

It matters if the player was a driver of wins during the cup run. Ex. Williams yes, but Osgood not really.

 

[Brooklanders*]

Not fully but yes, partially they do…like it or not.

Marcel Dionne is still seen as a great player despite not having won a Cup, but had he been on a dynasty team he would probably be more famous than he is.

On the other side, Patrick Roy won three Conn Smythe trophies. His Cups certainly help define him, they were no coincidence.

And if Hasek did not win those Cups with Detroit Roy would easily been voted the greater goalie all time.

Hasek wouldn't be as famous either.
No one would call him the dominator.
Same with Billy Smith who's regular season numbers were pretty pedestrian.

You can't tell me winning four straight cups and record for most consecutive playoff series wins define him as a player?
He doesn't even make the HOF unless he won in the playoffs.

 

[kingsholygrail]

Winning of course matters. HF however builds a false reality through some mental gymnastics to deny it, this is the usual process:

The first trick of HFBoards - Play Dumb:
Falsely assume that winning is all there is to it, so you can use stupid arguments like Colin Fraser with 2 Cups and momentarily play dumb.

The second trick of HFBoards - The Shifting "Team":
Go into a polar opposite argument and deem winning as irrelevant by generalizing winning to some kind of foreign object with superpowers that exists outside of reality referred to as "the team". "The team" wins but no player actually has any contribution to it, if you bring up an individual player on that team, HFBoards will quickly shift the focus on "the team", and this happens regardless of which player you bring up, thus eliminating all and every contribution an individual player has on a winning team, he becomes successful simply by being lucky enough to be on "The Team".

The third trick of HFboards - "The Final Equation and The Swap":
Once you create an illusion of eliminating an individual's impact on a winning franchise (as achieved by applying the first and second point in this post) HF achieves its end goal. A simple over generalized and of course false equation of: perceived skill level of player A + perceived skill level of player B + C +... = total team performance.

This allows HF to falsely conclude that any player that appears superficially similar (often in point production, technical skills, or otherwise) would have achieved the very same thing a winning player did simply by swapping teams. This is known as the HF's "anti-Toews" argument (of course it can be applied to several players, but I gave it the Toews moniker since it seems to be the most common, as well as Toews' value often having the biggest gap in the minds of hockey insiders and executives and HFBoards).

This is glorious.

 

[The Noot]

Winning of course matters. HF however builds a false reality through some mental gymnastics to deny it, this is the usual process:

The first trick of HFBoards - Play Dumb:
Falsely assume that winning is all there is to it, so you can use stupid arguments like Colin Fraser with 2 Cups and momentarily play dumb.

The second trick of HFBoards - The Shifting "Team":
Go into a polar opposite argument and deem winning as irrelevant by generalizing winning to some kind of foreign object with superpowers that exists outside of reality referred to as "the team". "The team" wins but no player actually has any contribution to it, if you bring up an individual player on that team, HFBoards will quickly shift the focus on "the team", and this happens regardless of which player you bring up, thus eliminating all and every contribution an individual player has on a winning team, he becomes successful simply by being lucky enough to be on "The Team".

The third trick of HFboards - "The Final Equation and The Swap":
Once you create an illusion of eliminating an individual's impact on a winning franchise (as achieved by applying the first and second point in this post) HF achieves its end goal. A simple over generalized and of course false equation of: perceived skill level of player A + perceived skill level of player B + C +... = total team performance.

This allows HF to falsely conclude that any player that appears superficially similar (often in point production, technical skills, or otherwise) would have achieved the very same thing a winning player did simply by swapping teams. This is known as the HF's "anti-Toews" argument (of course it can be applied to several players, but I gave it the Toews moniker since it seems to be the most common, as well as Toews' value often having the biggest gap in the minds of hockey insiders and executives and HFBoards).

I posted this in a recent Thornton thread but I think you can apply it to this thread just as well.

Let's take a look at the facts:

This is the average TOI/G of Joe Thornton during the playoffs in the years since 05-06.
05-06 | 25:08
06-07 | 21:59
07-08 | 24:41
08-09 | 19:14
09-10 | 21:19
10-11 | 22:15
11-12 | 21:53
12-13 | 20:16
13-14 | 19:19

now, a team has usually 5 players + 1 goalie on the ice. That means that, per game, there's 60 minutes * 6 players of ice time, means that there are a total of 360 minutes played per game per team. Let's just ignore OT and PIM for now because I don't feel like going that deep and the difference would be minimal anyway.

now, let's see how big the percentile of the team TOI that goes to Thornton is

05-06 | 25:08 | 1508 secs / 21600 secs = 6.98%
06-07 | 21:59 | 1319 secs / 21600 secs = 6.10%
07-08 | 24:41 | 1481 secs / 21600 secs = 6.85%
08-09 | 19:14 | 1154 secs / 21600 secs = 5.34%
09-10 | 21:19 | 1279 secs / 21600 secs = 5.92%
10-11 | 22:15 | 1335 secs / 21600 secs = 6.18%
11-12 | 21:53 | 1313 secs / 21600 secs = 6.08%
12-13 | 20:16 | 1216 secs / 21600 secs = 5.63%
13-14 | 19:19 | 1159 secs / 21600 secs = 5.37%

So, you guys want to tell me that a player, who is responsible for 5.34%-6.98% of the games played during the playoffs, is somehow at fault that he never won a cup? Yes, you expect more "performance" per minute from a star 1C than you'd expect from an enforcer. But still, the influence a single player has on a game is very limited.

It's a team sport, people.

Thornton received about as much ice time as your average 1st line center.

You're talking about a "foreign object with superpowers" called team. The team isn't a foreign superpower. The team are the other players, whose on ice time add up to ca 18 times the on ice time a first 1st line center receives.

To argue that a player (goalies aside) can carry a team to a cup eventhough his possibilities to actually influence a game are incredibly limited is naive, to say the least.

There is a reason why the goalie becoming hot during the playoffs is the ultimate jackpot for any team. Since he's the guy who has by far the most ice time of any player and due to the nature of his position he can influence a team performance the most. And even he has only 17% of the team TOI.

Again, hockey is a team sport.

 

[Nasti]

It's not a black or white answer. Obviously, a fourth liner shouldn't be considered a great player just because he was on a cup winning team, but it's also unfair to not give credit to great players who were big reasons for cup victories. IMO, it is completely fair to give credit to Toews or Kopitar for winning cups and it is equally fair to criticize Thornton for no cups having played on some great Sharks teams. It's the job of the best players of great teams to put their teams over the top. I would not, however, fault a guy like Dionne or Sundin because they never really played for great teams. Good teams at best.

 

[BretterThanYou]

And if Hasek did not win those Cups with Detroit Roy would easily been voted the greater goalie all time.

Hasek wouldn't be as famous either.
No one would call him the dominator.
Same with Billy Smith who's regular season numbers were pretty pedestrian.

You can't tell me winning four straight cups and record for most consecutive playoff series wins define him as a player?
He doesn't even make the HOF unless he won in the playoffs.

I believe he was being called the Dominator well before his time with the Red Wings.

 

[NikF]

I posted this in a recent Thornton thread but I think you can apply it to this thread just as well.



Thornton received about as much ice time as your average 1st line center.

You're talking about a "foreign object with superpowers" called team. The team isn't a foreign superpower. The team are the other players, whose on ice time add up to ca 18 times the on ice time a first 1st line center receives.

To argue that a player (goalies aside) can carry a team to a cup eventhough his possibilities to actually influence a game are incredibly limited is naive, to say the least.

There is a reason why the goalie becoming hot during the playoffs is the ultimate jackpot for any team. Since he's the guy who has by far the most ice time of any player and due to the nature of his position he can influence a team performance the most. And even he has only 17% of the team TOI.

Again, hockey is a team sport.

The mistake you are making is that you are isolating a player's ice time as his total impact on the team independent from other lines. It's a complex interplay, not line 1 enters the ice, line 2 is now independent of everything that has happened up to that point. What a player does on ice has an impact on shifts by other people. To reduce the totality of human experience and the team as a whole down to crude numbers is naive and tends to bring forth more of a video-game type of thinking - "if I trade you a Toews for a Giroux they'll do the same or even better because Giroux's technical skill are just as good or better", it tends to leave out an incredible amount of variables and it's a particularly narrow view-point lacking the big picture vision of team construction.

Even if we ignore locker room stuff that we aren't privy to, the type of player alone can have a down-the-lineup impact on the rest of the players. The irony of the saying that "hockey is a team sport" is that arguments like yours precisely fail at taking into account what "team" means past a superficial level of skill A + skill B = total team performance, instead it would be required to analyze whether how a player like Jonathan Toews plays the game has an impact on the rest of the team as a whole and how they perform. And how a team can be constructed around that type of player, and whether it lends itself better to winning.

The problem is the rabbit hole ends exactly at winning, and because a player's individual impact towards a winning team can't be completely empirically measurable, the tendency is now for fans to default to a very superficial statistical analysis as the be-all-end-all (especially in light of the advanced stats explosion, don't get me wrong I have tons of respect for statistical analysis and play with those numbers myself from time to time), not realizing that it is exactly that type of thinking that fails at fulfilling the "hockey is a team sport" criteria.

It is precisely the refusal to look at an individual player and try to deduct what a player's total impact on a winning team is past superficial analysis that renders some incapable of understanding the value a player like Toews has on winning. Instead of trying to deduct what that player's impact on winning is (as a whole, be it through team construction, style of play, situations they excel at or can be used in, how they perform in certain situations etc. the variables are many and you could write a novel on that inter-play alone), they look at players as isolated particles that are very simplistically summed up (usually by their skill level, or point production, or some other crude statistic) into total team performance.

So the depth of understanding in regards to what an individual contributes to a winning organization tends to be rather shallow within threads like these. That's why Toews and players of his ilk tend to consistently be rated higher by people within the industry than those outside of it, because the depth of perception as to what creates a winning team is different.

 

[clydesdale line]

Winning of course matters. HF however builds a false reality through some mental gymnastics to deny it, this is the usual process:

The first trick of HFBoards - Play Dumb:
Falsely assume that winning is all there is to it, so you can use stupid arguments like Colin Fraser with 2 Cups and momentarily play dumb.

The second trick of HFBoards - The Shifting "Team":
Go into a polar opposite argument and deem winning as irrelevant by generalizing winning to some kind of foreign object with superpowers that exists outside of reality referred to as "the team". "The team" wins but no player actually has any contribution to it, if you bring up an individual player on that team, HFBoards will quickly shift the focus on "the team", and this happens regardless of which player you bring up, thus eliminating all and every contribution an individual player has on a winning team, he becomes successful simply by being lucky enough to be on "The Team".

The third trick of HFboards - "The Final Equation and The Swap":
Once you create an illusion of eliminating an individual's impact on a winning franchise (as achieved by applying the first and second point in this post) HF achieves its end goal. A simple over generalized and of course false equation of: perceived skill level of player A + perceived skill level of player B + C +... = total team performance.

This allows HF to falsely conclude that any player that appears superficially similar (often in point production, technical skills, or otherwise) would have achieved the very same thing a winning player did simply by swapping teams. This is known as the HF's "anti-Toews" argument (of course it can be applied to several players, but I gave it the Toews moniker since it seems to be the most common, as well as Toews' value often having the biggest gap in the minds of hockey insiders and executives and HFBoards).

One of the best post I've ever seen on this board. Kudos.

 

[nmbr_24]

What matters as far as playoff victories or cup wins is if there is a noticeable difference in the players game. For example there were guys like Claude Lemieux who really elevated his game in the playoffs and there were guys like Joe Thornton who are noticeably less in the playoffs.

Those two players are partially defined by their playoffs, the guys who are the same in the regular season and the playoffs aren't so I don't think cups really matter as far as the majority of players go.

 

[blinds]

The mistake you are making is that you are isolating a player's ice time as his total impact on the team independent from other lines. It's a complex interplay, not line 1 enters the ice, line 2 is now independent of everything that has happened up to that point. What a player does on ice has an impact on shifts by other people. To reduce the totality of human experience and the team as a whole down to crude numbers is naive and tends to bring forth more of a video-game type of thinking - "if I trade you a Toews for a Giroux they'll do the same or even better because Giroux's technical skill are just as good or better", it tends to leave out an incredible amount of variables and it's a particularly narrow view-point lacking the big picture vision of team construction.

Even if we ignore locker room stuff that we aren't privy to, the type of player alone can have a down-the-lineup impact on the rest of the players. The irony of the saying that "hockey is a team sport" is that arguments like yours precisely fail at taking into account what "team" means past a superficial level of skill A + skill B = total team performance, instead it would be required to analyze whether how a player like Jonathan Toews plays the game has an impact on the rest of the team as a whole and how they perform. And how a team can be constructed around that type of player, and whether it lends itself better to winning.

The problem is the rabbit hole ends exactly at winning, and because a player's individual impact towards a winning team can't be completely empirically measurable, the tendency is now for fans to default to a very superficial statistical analysis as the be-all-end-all (especially in light of the advanced stats explosion, don't get me wrong I have tons of respect for statistical analysis and play with those numbers myself from time to time), not realizing that it is exactly that type of thinking that fails at fulfilling the "hockey is a team sport" criteria.

It is precisely the refusal to look at an individual player and try to deduct what a player's total impact on a winning team is past superficial analysis that renders some incapable of understanding the value a player like Toews has on winning. Instead of trying to deduct what that player's impact on winning is (as a whole, be it through team construction, style of play, situations they excel at or can be used in, how they perform in certain situations etc. the variables are many and you could write a novel on that inter-play alone), they look at players as isolated particles that are very simplistically summed up (usually by their skill level, or point production, or some other crude statistic) into total team performance.

So the depth of understanding in regards to what an individual contributes to a winning organization tends to be rather shallow within threads like these. That's why Toews and players of his ilk tend to consistently be rated higher by people within the industry than those outside of it, because the depth of perception as to what creates a winning team is different.

TLDR: Intangibles > Skill

That's all great, and you're right to a degree, but you're turning winning into this mystic phenomenon that we have no idea how it happens. You know what wins hockey games? Scoring goals and preventing other teams from scoring. The stats that you think are so crude represent this.

The rest of what you're talking about is how one player influences the rest of the team. Intangibles. That stuff's great, but there's almost no way to measure it. How can you conclusively say that Toews has it and Thornton and Giroux don't? They're both great leaders in their own right according to everyone around them. Because Toews has won? That's ridiculous, because he's been surrounded by a team of players with better tangibles than either of those two. There's no reason to attribute to intangibles what can be attributed to actual tangible stats and skill. The Blackhawks are a stacked, well-balanced team that would be doing amazing with or without Toews' supposed intangibles. Same with Team Canada.

Toews is a fantastic player. The stats themselves support that. It just seems like whenever a team wins a championship, there's a need to anoint their players the best in the world when it's not always the case. We saw it with Kopitar this summer. But it doesn't take the best players in the world to win the Cup, just the best team. The best players on that team don't suddenly possess some magic "winning attitude" that other players don't, we just feel the need to attribute the success of the team to the leaders of the team apparently. The best of the best like Toews, Thornton and Giroux are all competitive as hell, leaders, etc, I think it's just more confirmation bias than anything that the Cup winners get these magic "intangibles" attributed to them when they win, when more than anything it has to do with the other players on their team, context and luck.

Did Zetterberg and Datsyuk lose their intangibles when their team fell off? Will Toews if the Blackhawks do? I don't think there's anything that separates the intangibles of Toews and Kopitar from guys like Thornton, Giroux, Zetterberg and Datysuk other than who had the better team more recently.

There's certainly good leaders and bad leaders, but to define them by who has won and who hasn't is unfair. It takes so so so much more than good leadership to win a Cup.

 

[kmad]

"Yes" - Chris Dingman

 

[Blue And Orange]

6 Stanley Cup Wins did define Kevin Lowe as a player. But it also defined his arrogance which carried over when he got promoted to General Manager and then the President of Hockey Operations.

"And lasty, there's one other guy that's working in hockey today that's won more cups than me, so I think I know a little bit about winning, if there's ever a concern"

 

[NikF]

TLDR: Intangibles > Skill

That wasn't really the point, it wasn't skill vs intangibles, it was consider the totality of a player instead of making a superficial skills analysis. So my analysis is inclusive of skills not in opposition of skills.

That's all great, and you're right to a degree, but you're turning winning into this mystic phenomenon that we have no idea how it happens. You know what wins hockey games? Scoring goals and preventing other teams from scoring. The stats that you think are so crude represent this.

The stats represent it to a point, but not even close to the whole picture. Again you have to look at how a team is constructed to see the ease of building around a player like Jonathan Toews and what having a player like that allows other players to do and the impact of that on winning. I'm not saying to throw stats or skills into the trash, I'm merely favoring a more complete analysis of a player, that takes into account the big picture be it team construction or the impact a player like that has down throughout the line-up or the impact of a player who excels at all facets of the game in a short 7 game series against an equally strong team.

The rest of what you're talking about is how one player influences the rest of the team. Intangibles. That stuff's great, but there's almost no way to measure it. How can you conclusively say that Toews has it and Thornton and Giroux don't? They're both great leaders in their own right according to everyone around them. Because Toews has won? That's ridiculous, because he's been surrounded by a team of players with better tangibles than either of those two.

Well if you ignore the fact that Toews is one of the most decorated players in the game at all levels while playing a key role on those teams. I've already conceded there is no empirical evidence for it. It takes a complete approach, look at what the player does, what type of the player he is, what he allows other players to do, what type of situations he excels at, in what role can he be used, and yes stats too, and try to arrive at an intelligent conclusion. Again hockey execs do this all the time. It's ridiculous to discard all that in favor of a, well his teammates are better so he has nothing to do with it past what his skill-level is, just swap him with a player who is perceived to be equally skilled and the result will be the same.

There's no reason to attribute to intangibles what can be attributed to actual tangible stats and skill. The Blackhawks are a stacked, well-balanced team that would be doing amazing with or without Toews' supposed intangibles. Same with Team Canada.

You don't know whether they would win if you swapped Toews with a player who is PERCEIVED to be superficially similar. That's a swap of players in a vacuum, even with that said, it doesn't even take into account how the Hawks team turned out to be built around Toews and what part did he play as that team progressed towards Stanley Cup Contenders.

Toews is a fantastic player. The stats themselves support that. It just seems like whenever a team wins a championship, there's a need to anoint their players the best in the world when it's not always the case. We saw it with Kopitar this summer. But it doesn't take the best players in the world to win the Cup, just the best team. The best players on that team don't suddenly possess some magic "winning attitude" that other players don't, we just feel the need to attribute the success of the team to the leaders of the team apparently. The best of the best like Toews, Thornton and Giroux are all competitive as hell, leaders, etc, I think it's just more confirmation bias than anything that the Cup winners get these magic "intangibles" attributed to them when they win, when more than anything it has to do with the other players on their team, context and luck. Did Zetterberg and Datsyuk lose their intangibles when their team fell off? Will Toews if the Blackhawks do? I don't think there's anything that separates the intangibles of Toews and Kopitar from guys like Thornton, Giroux, Zetterberg and Datysuk other than who had the better team more recently.

Nobody is necessarily talking about "effort", some people use the word "intangibles" to denigrate something they don't want to think about, when "intangibles" are very "tangible", it's just short for something that takes a lot of explaining. Again to me there isn't anything "magical" about a player who excels at all facets of the game, in a 7 game series against a Cup contender you're gonna be stuck in your own end at some point. There's nothing intangible about your top player setting the tone for the standard of play and the identity the franchise wants to have, the players down the line-up will follow.

To me this isn't a skill vs "intangibles" issue, it's just about the depth of perception, whether you want to take a shallow, strictly empirical, and simplistic approach to explain everything, or you want to take a more qualitative analysis with more depth and consideration, the latter doesn't exclude "skills" or "stats" from being part of the equation, it just doesn't stop there. To me I want to find out what a player's impact on a WINNING organization is, in its totality. Nobody is arguing that a bunch of skilled players with good "character" is what makes up a good team, but you can't make simplistic swap of players and comparisons across the board without taking a deeper look and considering how that player impacts the organization as a whole. When you have GMs talking about "culture" and "identity", they're catchphrases of course, but it doesn't mean they're meaningless.

There's certainly good leaders and bad leaders, but to define them by who has won and who hasn't is unfair. It takes so so so much more than good leadership to win a Cup.

I mean, that is precisely my point. I'm favoring an inclusive whole approach to analysing something like this.

 

[MilanKraft*]

Media does and cups are overrated.

Robert Horry is the best..

 

[MilanKraft*]

Put towes on Edmonton and let's see those intangibles win a cup.

Most overrated player in modern hockey history.