I don't know by what metric it's more correct. Just seems like different ways of looking at the same dataset. And as mentioned previously, there are factors that can't be measured by the data. Overall I simply disagree with Bourque being that far ahead of Lidström, and I don't believe 2nd/3rd place finishes where he was nowhere near winning the award outweighs Lidström's additonal wins.
The gap is simply due to the fact that, despite Lidstrom's 2 additional wins, Bourque has 5 additional seasons receiving votes -- and not some negligible amount of votes either.
If we remove the finishes they share in common, it looks like this:
Bourque: 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 7, 7, 7
Lidstrom: 1, 1, 5, 6, 6, 6, 8
If the question is who had the greater share of the Norris trophy over the course of his career, the answer will lean toward the guy who had nearly twice as many relevant seasons and three times as many finalist seasons. The 1s are of course impressive and help offset that impact, but two 1sts doesn't fully offset 6 finalists -- that is, roughly, like the difference between Rod Langway and Brad Park. Nobody would reasonably argue Langway over Park.
Well, you'd probably have more voters that barely watched him play and decided to vote him 4th instead of 1st.
That would be a pretty marginal effect, based on people not paying attention
at all to
anything. Doubling the size of the league would only make it that much easier for McDavid to make the highlight reel every night against former AHL trash, which is exactly what we saw with guys like Esposito and Hull when this happened in real life.
I'd agree with those rankings, although it's a bit early for Karlsson perhaps.
Karlsson is nowhere remotely close to Denis Potvin.
edit: I wrote that thinking you meant in terms of quality of player. I hope that's not what you meant. They are close in terms of Norris profile, largely because of Potvin's sharp decline after injuries in '81.
Que? There is no "corrected" and "more accurate" here. The first formula didn't "feel right" so the data was manipulated to spit out a result more in line with the pre-conceived idea. Not to put HO on blast here, but that's about the furthest thing from a purely analytical look at data as is possible. If a result is interesting or unexpected you don't just "fix" the formula until you get what you want.
It literally was not correctly weighted. HO recognized that a mistake had been made and fixed it. It's just a matter of math.
Those mountains of 4th and 5th place votes... Lidstrom had more 1st place votes in 2008 than he had 5th place votes his entire career. And in looking at voting data... Bourque had all of four 1st place votes the last 5 years of his career combined. I wonder why it makes sense to make pre-1996 1sts stronger and post-1996 1sts weaker...
Because the question is about Norris
share, and by definition there will be a more spread-out share in situations where the ballot is larger. Again this is just math, it's not a value judgment.
You can certainly make a case that there should be a mental correction for post-96 players to account for the change in weighting, but you cannot argue that the first list is correct -- it just
isn't. And the first list still had Bourque ahead of Lidstrom anyway, despite the error favoring Lidstrom.
