We could add a 2nd team in 1994 to that list. It was one of Gretzky's least impressive seasons at the time. Only 130 points and he was also a -25 while Bourque won the Norris over Stevens with 91 points. I get what you mean though. It's tough to stay among the best centers in a given season when the competition is so high. I'm also not sure if this is the way to go about comparing their seasons individually as it's tough to compare positions across AS teams. It's also not as simple as looking at how they fared against their peers at their position but the fact that Bourque managed to remain among the best for so long and longer than anyone ever as a D man should count for something.
If Gilmour in 1994 can’t top Gretzky, I don’t see Bourque being there either.
Is Bourque’s 1980-1996 run all that more unusual than Messier’s 1982-1997 run? Both are longer primes than what would normally be expected, given the generation of players directly preceding them. Of course, Bourque popped back up for nominations three and five years later whereas Messier had, at best, stretches of great sustained play in parts of a few years (2001 comes to mind).
But what does it mean to be the 3rd best defenseman in 1999? That you’re better than 67 GP Chris Pronger and 68 GP Eric Desjardins and 62 GP Rob Blake. What does it mean to be the 2nd best defenseman in 2001? That you’re better than 67 GP Rob Blake and 59 GP Al MacInnis and 51 GP Chris Pronger.
He wasn’t
Bourque any more. He could still pick up nominations as a minus-player against a weak field when the alternative is voting for players with missing time, and he could look dynamite on the best team in hockey. But if there’s not all of these gigantic holes where quality Norris competition
should be, the run probably ends in 1996.
How many forwards in 1999 and 2001 would we have to count off before we could confidently say that Bourque, the 3rd and 2nd place finisher in Norris voting, was the better player that season? 15-20 each?
Don’t get me wrong; I’ll take Bourque’s 1996-97 through 2000-01 over Mark Messier’s 1997-98 through 2003-04. But I think we’re getting diminishing returns after the 16-17 other seasons where Messier was ahead - if not in the regular seasons on their own, then because of his playoffs. Or at least it was neck-and-neck and not a top-10 player vs. a ~30th ranked one.
Like I said, put Messier against Bourque’s competition each season and tell me you don’t come back with 5-7 seasons where he was better than the field, just as we say about Bourque.
Just because a player is ineligible for the Norris doesn’t mean we can’t look at what it means to win the Norris (in 1988, this meant being better than Stevens, Suter, McCrimmon and the field) and say, “Mark Messier, while not as good as Mario Lemieux or Wayne Gretzky, clears this bar.”