5th Greatest all time

[BenchBrawl]

Of course, and costs keep getting worse and worse. I think you may be underestimating how many families either make due or simply have the money here in Canada though. And when the family has lots of money, or it appears to be worth the investment, the kid gets high level training and lots of ice-time.

I think you are also overselling how many kids could play in the first half of the century. It was very much regional, at least far more than today, and we’ve always had immigrant families who didn’t learn how to skate or get into hockey. And of course you would hear these stories from and about guys who made the NHL because they were the fortunate ones.

That’s just Canada though...

We clearly don't come from the same place. The crushing majority of people I know are living by the paycheck.

 

[Kyle McMahon]

Sorry, let me clarify. I meant Fetisov's peers who could challenge him as the top defender in his league. There was his own partner Kasatonov and I'm sure several other NHL level guys but it's not anything to write home about overall. Not compared with a strong and deep era of the NHL era anyways. It was similar for Harvey and his era. He had Kelly early and Pilote late, but in reality this wasn't the 90's NHL and it was very shallow for truly elite defenseman. We have to keep their dominance in context due to the leagues they played in. Same applies overall to the talent pool of the RSL in the 80's but I was specifically thinking about defenseman and what their competition was.

Referring to the "level of competition" at the defense position specifically, implies that Norris and All-Star counting is the crux of the argument. No credible propenent of Harvey as a possible top 5 candidate is presenting such a superficial case.

No, but Harvey is in the sections top 10 so based on that he should be considered along with the other three O6 guys after Howe. So the O6 has 4 candidates and only Crosby qualifies for this era and the baby boomers like Bourque and Roy round it out. You must realize how unrealistic this all is. It's based on peer to peer comparisons with a fairly heavy bias towards "the golden era of hockey" or whatever some call it here. In reality it just appears to be a domestic league that has been overrated due to the NHL name that it had and for having the best players in the world at the time. It actually just displays the fact that hockey grew and spread and so did the league.

This just comes back to the erroneous idea that the laws of probability are inherently fair and as such every era's number of truly great best of the best players must be exactly proportional to the overall strength of the era. In practice, a generally weak era may very well produce more top 10 candidates than a generally strong one. There's no mechanism to prevent clustering within the sample.

If it got bigger and more diverse then how did it not also get deeper, too? They go hand and hand here so just admit it already.

More teams having to share the available talent will lead to worse players in prominent roles than if there were fewer teams. If the NHL shrunk itself by 10 teams tomorrow, former second line players might find themselves battling to stay on the 4th line. 3rd and 4th line players that can be exploited by elite players would no longer be playing. The average team would be significantly deeper in talent.

I don't know how old you are but I remember the Russians coming over and that alone made the NHL better, more diverse, and deeper - if you don't think Bure, Fedorov, and Mogilny joining the league alone didn't make it better for us fans than I don't know what to tell you. Expansion came again around that time too to make it bigger. That's just one obvious example. We see slower integrations from other nations so it's less obvious but those happened as well.

Better is an entirely subjective term. Some people will think the O6 NHL with a more rigidly structured game and all the talent packed into six teams is better than the high speed modern era with talent spread across 31 NHL teams plus the KHL. Others the opposite. Regardless, assuming that whichever era you find better must necessarily have produced more and better players at the absolute very top of the pecking order, is fallacious.

Yeah, vastly different but the 2020 NHL is a large international league with elite players from multiple countries. The 50's NHL and 80's RSL weren't this, they both looked like domestic leagues in terms of where the talent came. They were actually a lot closer to each other in these regards than the 2020 NHL, or even the 1992 NHL. That's my point. If an old Soviet fan came in and told everyone there's the big 4, then the Green unit in his all-time top 9 players he wouldn't be taken seriously. That's kind of how I feel about having 5 players from the O6 in this sections top 10. It's not to be taken seriously and there's a clear bias.

It's rather disingenuous to suggest that the inclusion of the players you're referring to is some sort of fawning over the 1950s NHL. Bobby Hull was a 60s player who kept it going at a high level well into the 70s. Jean Beliveau was still an elite player upon retirement in 1971. Gordie Howe was still a reasonably effective player in 1980. The era that you refer to as "the 50s" is actually about 30 years long, not an insignificant portion of the sport's history as a mature entity.

 

[Voight]

Of course, and costs keep getting worse and worse. I think you may be underestimating how many families either make due or simply have the money here in Canada though. And when the family has lots of money, or it appears to be worth the investment, the kid gets high level training and lots of ice-time.

I think you are also overselling how many kids could play in the first half of the century. It was very much regional, at least far more than today, and we’ve always had immigrant families who didn’t learn how to skate or get into hockey. And of course you would hear these stories from and about guys who made the NHL because they were the fortunate ones.

That’s just Canada though...

Back then you had things such as Church teams that could sponsor kids and get even the dirt poor kids equipment / a chance to play.

Junior teams were also able to sign players as young as 12. Plus you had the O6 teams sponsoring kids clubs/organizations and getting all the kids the equipment and ice time they needed. (obviously they did this because they were trying to develop future stars)

 

[danincanada]

Actually, they don't. If the same-size League suddenly got more diverse, then it got deeper, yes. But that's not what you're saying:

If you think about this, you'll see it doesn't make sense. Of course adding players from Russia improved the high-end talent of the League (just as adding players from Sweden / Finland added to the high-end talent in the 70s/80s), but as the League simultaneously expanded, the League didn't get any deeper.

I'm always baffled as to why people don't understand this. Simply adding more good players doesn't make the League deeper if the League is way bigger.

How many teams are there next year -- 32? Let's just compare that with, say, 26 teams. Six more teams means 130 or 140 more full-time players have to be employed at the NHL level. How many of those 140 players are noticeably above-average players? Very few. Most of the new NHL jobs after large-scale expansion go to scrubs, discarded players, and third/fourth-liners.

Generally speaking, the "deepest" and richest periods of high-end talent concentration in the NHL are just before periods of expansion, when the League had been stable in size for years, and while the talent-pool -- but not the number of teams -- was expanding. So, probably the period around the early 1960s to 1967 was a very deep period. Probably the late-80s and early-90s was a very deep period.

But I personally don't think the recent period of, say, 2012 to 2017 was a particularly 'deep' period of talent. The talent pool is basically the same as in, say, 2000, but there are too many teams now. Today's NHL talent-pool is more like the early-70s when there were too many teams.

It's not the high-end players at the top who tell us how rich and deep the talent level is. (There are always great players at the top... well, except in 2001-02.) It's the players right in the middle who tell the story. If you ranked all 110 players from top to bottom in 1966-67, or ranked all 620-or-whatever players from top to bottom today, and then drew a line right in the center of that ranking, then compare the players in different eras who fall right into the center of the list. That tells us how deep a particular era was.

It’s nice to see this is your only dispute.

I think in reality, it probably still got deeper overall in the early 90’s. Each example is different of course.

If you look at the link below you can see how the number of both the Soviets and Czech players rose from 20 players in 1989 when there were 21 teams to 109 players by the time it went up to 26 teams in 1993.

Do the simple math (100 more players needed for 5 more teams while the number of Eastern Euro players increased by only 89) and your point stands but what about all the other factors? Look at who those Eastern European players were and the roles they played on their teams. A lot of star players suddenly started to come over that wouldn’t have before. They played huge roles on their teams, got lots of ice-time, and who did they really replace? Goons, 4th liners? Who did they move down the lineup on their own teams because they arrived? It was an upgrade for the league, even with expansion. Individual teams would tell you they got better and deeper when they added those guys. That’s why most teams were trying to get their hands on them.

NHL Players By Nationality 1969-2009 | NHL.com - All-Access Vancouver

Anyways, use whatever term you want. The league got better because of it and it was nice to finally actually see most of the worlds best playing in one league.

 

[danincanada]

Back then you had things such as Church teams that could sponsor kids and get even the dirt poor kids equipment / a chance to play.

Junior teams were also able to sign players as young as 12. Plus you had the O6 teams sponsoring kids clubs/organizations and getting all the kids the equipment and ice time they needed. (obviously they did this because they were trying to develop future stars)

No doubt it happened in some parts of Canada for some periods of time. It didn’t happen all over Canada and consistently though. None of my relatives were part of this and I come from a big family.

It’s almost like some here believe Canada had some sort of military camp for hockey back then because that’s what it would probably take to bring the talent pool up to what you think it was (not you personally Voight).

 

[The Panther]

It’s nice to see this is your only dispute.

I think in reality, it probably still got deeper overall in the early 90’s. Each example is different of course.

If you look at the link below you can see how the number of both the Soviets and Czech players rose from 20 players in 1989 when there were 21 teams to 109 players by the time it went up to 26 teams in 1993.

Do the simple math (100 more players needed for 5 more teams while the number of Eastern Euro players increased by only 89) and your point stands but what about all the other factors? Look at who those Eastern European players were and the roles they played on their teams. A lot of star players suddenly started to come over that wouldn’t have before. They played huge roles on their teams, got lots of ice-time, and who did they really replace? Goons, 4th liners? Who did they move down the lineup on their own teams because they arrived? It was an upgrade for the league, even with expansion. Individual teams would tell you they got better and deeper when they added those guys. That’s why most teams were trying to get their hands on them.

NHL Players By Nationality 1969-2009 | NHL.com - All-Access Vancouver

Anyways, use whatever term you want. The league got better because of it and it was nice to finally actually see most of the worlds best playing in one league.

Let's say there were 100 "elite" players (arbitrary number) in the NHL in 1989. So, there was a mathematical average of 4.76 elite players per team.

Then, let's say of those 89 further ex-Soviet and Czech players you mention, 20 to 25 of them were "elite" by the arbitrary standard, above (that's probably being more than generous). So, now there are around 120-125 elite players. Of course that's a good thing to have more elites, and, as you say, good to have players from all the hockey countries. But having been 4.76 elite players-per-team average in 1989, it means to maintain that average we need no more than about five or six new NHL teams. That would be about 25 or 26 teams. The NHL reached 26 teams in 1993-94. I personally think that was just right for then, and probably right for now, too.

I agree that the early-1990s seemed very talent laden. Three things happened:
- new players from Russia / Czech
- elite 80s'-era players stayed elite well into the 90s (unlike the previous generation)
- exposure of the sport through US Gold medal in 1980 and the cable-TV / Gretzky / record-breaking era had led to more widespread interest and participation, neatly dovetailing with rises in salaries.


Certainly it would be absurd to have only 12 teams or something today, but the basic math tells me that the fewer teams there are, the better the concentrated talent.

 

[wetcoast]

If you want a clearer idea of how Moore and Geoffrion ended up where they did on the list you reference, I'd recommend the associated discussion threads. It's not like it's some cloak and dagger mystery.

It's not a mystery to me as I outlined why they did in my post and I followed the project quite closely at the time.

 

[Kyle McMahon]

It's not a mystery to me as I outlined why they did in my post and I followed the project quite closely at the time.

So all you gleaned from those discussions was that Moore and Geoffrion's rankings were nothing more than Cup counting? Strange then that Henri Richard didn't make the top 10 and Yvon Cournoyer didn't get discussed.

 

[danincanada]

Referring to the "level of competition" at the defense position specifically, implies that Norris and All-Star counting is the crux of the argument. No credible propenent of Harvey as a possible top 5 candidate is presenting such a superficial case.

Superficial? You can’t pinpoint one thing you base your opinion on but is there anything somewhat objective that you do base it on? Do you really have a problem with a starting point of comparing a player with his own peers in his era, and his standing among them, whether it’s simply stating he was the best defenseman of his era or looking at the accolades that would prove that? Where do you start then?

I’ve typed enough in this very thread to prove I’m not only looking at Norris and AS voting. I think it’s actually very clear that I’m trying to look at the “big picture” a lot more than you are actually when comparing across vastly different eras. It’s not about reverence for me, I want to know who the best were.

This just comes back to the erroneous idea that the laws of probability are inherently fair and as such every era's number of truly great best of the best players must be exactly proportional to the overall strength of the era. In practice, a generally weak era may very well produce more top 10 candidates than a generally strong one. There's no mechanism to prevent clustering within the sample.

No, that’s not the idea. How about the erroneous idea, and convenient assumption in your case, that somehow pre-baby boom Canada could produce as many top 10 all-time players as the whole world has since?

According to this section 5 of the top 10 players were all born within an 18 year span before the baby boom in Canada.

The remaining 5 were all born between 1948 and now, but really only someone as young as Crosby could qualify for most so it’s to 1987, which is 39 years of Canada post baby boom with the other hockey nations joining in developing elite players as we have seen, which should be kind of a big deal for most, considering what has happened.

What is the reasoning for this anomaly? People were just inherently better at hockey, worked the farm in the summer and/or were blue collar, and played at his church or school programs as a kid? Do all of these apply for you? Is there anything else more tangible?

You can look at what I’m saying from any angle and it makes it very hard for you to justify any counter argument, other than “anything could happen” so no one can prove anything.

I’ll take probability over this hoping some insane anomaly took place and that era could overcome the sheer numbers against them.

It’s simply not realistic that the top guys from that era get those lofty positions without a huge bias towards their era. People calling it the golden era proves what I’m saying even more.

More teams having to share the available talent will lead to worse players in prominent roles than if there were fewer teams. If the NHL shrunk itself by 10 teams tomorrow, former second line players might find themselves battling to stay on the 4th line. 3rd and 4th line players that can be exploited by elite players would no longer be playing. The average team would be significantly deeper in talent.

That’s one way of looking at depth and you have a point. But there’s also overall league depth, like how many truly great defenseman are in the league at one time to challenge the top guy? Everyone talks about the early 90s as being deep for great dmen. Did the O6 actually have this? I don’t think it did for the reasons I’ve stated and shown.

Better is an entirely subjective term. Some people will think the O6 NHL with a more rigidly structured game and all the talent packed into six teams is better than the high speed modern era with talent spread across 31 NHL teams plus the KHL. Others the opposite. Regardless, assuming that whichever era you find better must necessarily have produced more and better players at the absolute very top of the pecking order, is fallacious.

So you don’t think the Soviets coming over and joining the NHL made the league better?

It's rather disingenuous to suggest that the inclusion of the players you're referring to is some sort of fawning over the 1950s NHL. Bobby Hull was a 60s player who kept it going at a high level well into the 70s. Jean Beliveau was still an elite player upon retirement in 1971. Gordie Howe was still a reasonably effective player in 1980. The era that you refer to as "the 50s" is actually about 30 years long, not an insignificant portion of the sport's history as a mature entity.

They were all born pre-baby boom and they all played in the league at the same time.

 

[wetcoast]

So all you gleaned from those discussions was that Moore and Geoffrion's rankings were nothing more than Cup counting? Strange then that Henri Richard didn't make the top 10 and Yvon Cournoyer didn't get discussed.

Why are you making this such a black and white thing when it's all about greys?

Playing in an 06 league on a dynasty really helped propel Dickie Moore into the top 100 when it's pretty clear that his resume isn't deserving for him to be there.

His top 10 scoring finishes are 1,1,8,8 and that's not really enough for a top 100 player IMO that brings so little to the table other than scoring in a 5 year period to a dynasty team.

Connor McDavid after this season will now have 5 top 5 Hart and Art Ross finishes of 1,1,2,2.

We know how voters of the day treated Moore in hart voting and no that can't all be attributed to how the voting worked back then either as simply put no one ever seriously thought Moore was the best player in the league for any stretch of time did they?

Surely Connor is ahead of Dickie Moore at 69 now right?

Or how about Patrick Kane who finished 93rd in voting at the time.

Was there really any justifiable reason for Moore over Kane at the time as there certainly isn't now is there?

 

[wetcoast]

Actually, they don't. If the same-size League suddenly got more diverse, then it got deeper, yes. But that's not what you're saying:

If you think about this, you'll see it doesn't make sense. Of course adding players from Russia improved the high-end talent of the League (just as adding players from Sweden / Finland added to the high-end talent in the 70s/80s), but as the League simultaneously expanded, the League didn't get any deeper.

I'm always baffled as to why people don't understand this. Simply adding more good players doesn't make the League deeper if the League is way bigger.

How many teams are there next year -- 32? Let's just compare that with, say, 26 teams. Six more teams means 130 or 140 more full-time players have to be employed at the NHL level. How many of those 140 players are noticeably above-average players? Very few. Most of the new NHL jobs after large-scale expansion go to scrubs, discarded players, and third/fourth-liners.

Generally speaking, the "deepest" and richest periods of high-end talent concentration in the NHL are just before periods of expansion, when the League had been stable in size for years, and while the talent-pool -- but not the number of teams -- was expanding. So, probably the period around the early 1960s to 1967 was a very deep period. Probably the late-80s and early-90s was a very deep period.

But I personally don't think the recent period of, say, 2012 to 2017 was a particularly 'deep' period of talent. The talent pool is basically the same as in, say, 2000, but there are too many teams now. Today's NHL talent-pool is more like the early-70s when there were too many teams.

It's not the high-end players at the top who tell us how rich and deep the talent level is. (There are always great players at the top... well, except in 2001-02.) It's the players right in the middle who tell the story. If you ranked all 110 players from top to bottom in 1966-67, or ranked all 620-or-whatever players from top to bottom today, and then drew a line right in the center of that ranking, then compare the players in different eras who fall right into the center of the list. That tells us how deep a particular era was.

This argument always sounds good but then again there are huge problems with it as the watered down 70's get glossed over and the 21 team league grew very slowly in comparison to the influx of players from new talent streams.

Even when player dominate the Canadian talent to such a large extant like Crosby and even Jagr did that doesn't get recognized when other players vying for the top 5 like Hull, Richard, Beliveau, Harvey ect are brought into the discussion.


To put it simply, it's quite clear that the project, as a whole, doesn't contextualize the changes in talent input for the NHL over it's history plain and simple.

 

[Dennis Bonvie]

Why are you making this such a black and white thing when it's all about greys?

Playing in an 06 league on a dynasty really helped propel Dickie Moore into the top 100 when it's pretty clear that his resume isn't deserving for him to be there.

His top 10 scoring finishes are 1,1,8,8 and that's not really enough for a top 100 player IMO that brings so little to the table other than scoring in a 5 year period to a dynasty team.

Connor McDavid after this season will now have 5 top 5 Hart and Art Ross finishes of 1,1,2,2.

We know how voters of the day treated Moore in hart voting and no that can't all be attributed to how the voting worked back then either as simply put no one ever seriously thought Moore was the best player in the league for any stretch of time did they?

Surely Connor is ahead of Dickie Moore at 69 now right?

Or how about Patrick Kane who finished 93rd in voting at the time.

Was there really any justifiable reason for Moore over Kane at the time as there certainly isn't now is there?

One of the other things Moore brought to the table was defensive ability. A key component for any great team. Not a lot of Art Ross trophy winners that were excellent defensively.

Most players in the Top 100 were never considered the best player in the league for any stretch of time.

 

[wetcoast]

One of the other things Moore brought to the table was defensive ability. A key component for any great team. Not a lot of Art Ross trophy winners that were excellent defensively.

Most players in the Top 100 were never considered the best player in the league for any stretch of time.

Still we are talking about 5 relevant NHL seasons here.

Datsyuk has more relevant offensive seasons and was a ton better defensively and where is he on the list?

Heck even Fedorov was 88th, pretty hard to square that fact.

 

[Kyle McMahon]

Superficial? You can’t pinpoint one thing you base your opinion on but is there anything somewhat objective that you do base it on? Do you really have a problem with a starting point of comparing a player with his own peers in his era, and his standing among them, whether it’s simply stating he was the best defenseman of his era or looking at the accolades that would prove that? Where do you start then?

I’ve typed enough in this very thread to prove I’m not only looking at Norris and AS voting. I think it’s actually very clear that I’m trying to look at the “big picture” a lot more than you are actually when comparing across vastly different eras. It’s not about reverence for me, I want to know who the best were.



No, that’s not the idea. How about the erroneous idea, and convenient assumption in your case, that somehow pre-baby boom Canada could produce as many top 10 all-time players as the whole world has since?

According to this section 5 of the top 10 players were all born within an 18 year span before the baby boom in Canada.

The remaining 5 were all born between 1948 and now, but really only someone as young as Crosby could qualify for most so it’s to 1987, which is 39 years of Canada post baby boom with the other hockey nations joining in developing elite players as we have seen, which should be kind of a big deal for most, considering what has happened.

What is the reasoning for this anomaly? People were just inherently better at hockey, worked the farm in the summer and/or were blue collar, and played at his church or school programs as a kid? Do all of these apply for you? Is there anything else more tangible?

You can look at what I’m saying from any angle and it makes it very hard for you to justify any counter argument, other than “anything could happen” so no one can prove anything.

I’ll take probability over this hoping some insane anomaly took place and that era could overcome the sheer numbers against them.

It’s simply not realistic that the top guys from that era get those lofty positions without a huge bias towards their era. People calling it the golden era proves what I’m saying even more.



That’s one way of looking at depth and you have a point. But there’s also overall league depth, like how many truly great defenseman are in the league at one time to challenge the top guy? Everyone talks about the early 90s as being deep for great dmen. Did the O6 actually have this? I don’t think it did for the reasons I’ve stated and shown.



So you don’t think the Soviets coming over and joining the NHL made the league better?



They were all born pre-baby boom and they all played in the league at the same time.

At this point we're not even arguing about who is better than who. I'll entertain differences in opinion and alternate perspectives all day, but you're clearly arguing from a philosophy that it's not even theoretically possible that certain eras could have produced the number of great players that is being proposed. Or that the chance of it is so remote as to be reasonably dismissed. Expecting that a group of people who have spent tens of thousands of hours meticulously researching and enriching their knowledge of the sport's history to just agree that these past eras were inferior to recent ones as a default position from which all arguments must be based, is a fool's errand. You may very well convince everyone that the Original Six stars have been historically overrated. But you will not convince everyone that it's because the population of the country at the time they were born made it easier to have a great career.

People calling the Original Six a golden era proves nothing besides...some people consider it a golden era. Either they started with the premise that it was a golden era for some unknown reason and rate the players to square with this idea; or after interpreting available evidence and rating the players according to that interpretation, people began to informally suggest a certain time was a golden era. In most cases I believe it's the latter. I'm 33; there's no real reason for me to have a starting-point bias towards players from an era that even my dad didn't experience.

Did the Soviets make the NHL better? My favorite player was Igor Ulanov, so sure. But the NHL also expanded considerably around the same time. I'd prefer a league with fewer teams and less presence in non-traditional markets. What's better to some is not better to others.

Lemieux and Hasek played in the league at the same time as Crosby, I suppose you'd agree they played in the same era?

 

[The Panther]

This argument always sounds good but then again there are huge problems with it as the watered down 70's get glossed over and the 21 team league grew very slowly in comparison to the influx of players from new talent streams.

That's exactly the point I was making in my post when I said the League expanded (70s) but it didn't get any deeper.

 

[danincanada]

At this point we're not even arguing about who is better than who. I'll entertain differences in opinion and alternate perspectives all day, but you're clearly arguing from a philosophy that it's not even theoretically possible that certain eras could have produced the number of great players that is being proposed. Or that the chance of it is so remote as to be reasonably dismissed. Expecting that a group of people who have spent tens of thousands of hours meticulously researching and enriching their knowledge of the sport's history to just agree that these past eras were inferior to recent ones as a default position from which all arguments must be based, is a fool's errand. You may very well convince everyone that the Original Six stars have been historically overrated. But you will not convince everyone that it's because the population of the country at the time they were born made it easier to have a great career.

First bolded - how so?

Second bold - What I've pointed to is that it seems this section believes the past era (O6 in particular) is at least equal, if not superior, when it comes to producing top 10 players. That's okay though? From what I can gather it's probably more to do with reverence and/or weak peer to peer comparisons than anything else and this has actually made people feel that overall they were superior to more modern day players.

Last bold - just the population of the country? Are you not reading my posts? How about said country first going through a major boom in population and prosperity, leading to both more kids and more resources and expendable income overall in the country? That wouldn't impact how many great players it produces... really??? Then as we've clearly seen both the US and Europe have joined in producing so many elite palyers as well. I'm sorry, where's your argument again?

People calling the Original Six a golden era proves nothing besides...some people consider it a golden era. Either they started with the premise that it was a golden era for some unknown reason and rate the players to square with this idea; or after interpreting available evidence and rating the players according to that interpretation, people began to informally suggest a certain time was a golden era. In most cases I believe it's the latter. I'm 33; there's no real reason for me to have a starting-point bias towards players from an era that even my dad didn't experience.

Maybe someone could try to call it a golden era for Canadian hockey but it's very odd to call it the golden era of hockey when it was really only one nation supplying the players to the league most of the time.

Did the Soviets make the NHL better? My favorite player was Igor Ulanov, so sure. But the NHL also expanded considerably around the same time. I'd prefer a league with fewer teams and less presence in non-traditional markets. What's better to some is not better to others.

The answer is yes. Certainly as fans, watching the Soviets/Russians come over was amazing. So much entertainment was added for NHL fans and it clearly made the league better to have those guys in it.

I'm not really concerned with non-traditional markets provided they learn the sport and grow to love it, too. Look at San Jose for example, it's basically turned into a traditional market. They've always supported them and at least on TV it seems they have very passionate fans. It's a minor example of the impact the Soviets had coming over, too. Third year into expansion after a .143 winning % the season before and they use Makarov, Larionov, Irbe, and Ozolinsh to turn things around. They knock off my team in the first round and were a Garpenlov cross bar away from knocking off the Leafs as well. It's a very interesting case.

Lemieux and Hasek played in the league at the same time as Crosby, I suppose you'd agree they played in the same era?

For the record, Lemieux and Hasek are both 22 years older than Crosby. The O6 example had Richard being 18 years older than Hull. It's a reasonable comparison.

The main point still stands though, and that is how does pre-baby boom Canada produce as many top 10 players all-time as baby-boom and post baby-boom Canada with the US and Europe joining in producing elite players as well? It's so unrealistic that it points to there being a major problem with how players are compared over vastly different eras here.

 

[Sentinel]

This quest has lost its way and wandered far off its destination.

 

[Kyle McMahon]

First bolded - how so?

Second bold - What I've pointed to is that it seems this section believes the past era (O6 in particular) is at least equal, if not superior, when it comes to producing top 10 players. That's okay though? From what I can gather it's probably more to do with reverence and/or weak peer to peer comparisons than anything else and this has actually made people feel that overall they were superior to more modern day players.

Last bold - just the population of the country? Are you not reading my posts? How about said country first going through a major boom in population and prosperity, leading to both more kids and more resources and expendable income overall in the country? That wouldn't impact how many great players it produces... really??? Then as we've clearly seen both the US and Europe have joined in producing so many elite palyers as well. I'm sorry, where's your argument again?



Maybe someone could try to call it a golden era for Canadian hockey but it's very odd to call it the golden era of hockey when it was really only one nation supplying the players to the league most of the time.



The answer is yes. Certainly as fans, watching the Soviets/Russians come over was amazing. So much entertainment was added for NHL fans and it clearly made the league better to have those guys in it.

I'm not really concerned with non-traditional markets provided they learn the sport and grow to love it, too. Look at San Jose for example, it's basically turned into a traditional market. They've always supported them and at least on TV it seems they have very passionate fans. It's a minor example of the impact the Soviets had coming over, too. Third year into expansion after a .143 winning % the season before and they use Makarov, Larionov, Irbe, and Ozolinsh to turn things around. They knock off my team in the first round and were a Garpenlov cross bar away from knocking off the Leafs as well. It's a very interesting case.



For the record, Lemieux and Hasek are both 22 years older than Crosby. The O6 example had Richard being 18 years older than Hull. It's a reasonable comparison.

The main point still stands though, and that is how does pre-baby boom Canada produce as many top 10 players all-time as baby-boom and post baby-boom Canada with the US and Europe joining in producing elite players as well? It's so unrealistic that it points to there being a major problem with how players are compared over vastly different eras here.

Your last sentence answers your first question. You feel that it's practically impossible that an era of lower population and one country supplying all the players could possibly produce as many or more candidates for the #5 player as subsequent eras. If players are being disqualified from consideration at the outset due to the data on their birth certificates rather than their own merits, we're not really debating the players themselves.

I don't think this section generally believes the O6 was superior. The players born in the baby boom era who peaked from the mid 70s to the early 90s appear to be the most plentiful on the top 100 list voted on by many regulars in here. So it seems this population boom/era of social prosperity is indeed reflected, intentional or not. That this isn't borne out in your (very small) chosen sub-sample (just the top 10) can be attributed to statistical randomness as much as anything. I mean, look at that #53-62 sample of ten...not a single guy born between 1933 and 1973 to be found! I guess everyone really soured on the 60s, 70s, and 80s NHL all of a sudden...

 

[danincanada]

Your last sentence answers your first question. You feel that it's practically impossible that an era of lower population and one country supplying all the players could possibly produce as many or more candidates for the #5 player as subsequent eras. If players are being disqualified from consideration at the outset due to the data on their birth certificates rather than their own merits, we're not really debating the players themselves.

I don't think this section generally believes the O6 was superior. The players born in the baby boom era who peaked from the mid 70s to the early 90s appear to be the most plentiful on the top 100 list voted on by many regulars in here. So it seems this population boom/era of social prosperity is indeed reflected, intentional or not. That this isn't borne out in your (very small) chosen sub-sample (just the top 10) can be attributed to statistical randomness as much as anything. I mean, look at that #53-62 sample of ten...not a single guy born between 1933 and 1973 to be found! I guess everyone really soured on the 60s, 70s, and 80s NHL all of a sudden...

It’s not about disqualifying anyone. It’s just glaringly obvious something is wrong with so many being from that era due to the reasons I’ve mentioned.

Why are you worrying about the rest of the top 100? The point is the top O6 guys took so many of the lofty positions (top 10), which should mean they are some of the top considerations for # 5 (the very topic of this thread) - assuming the list the voters in this section produced is followed.

It’s not like those O6 guys have impeccable careers or dominated far more than the top guys from other eras. If they did they would have a better case but on a peer to peer level alone they don’t stand out that much versus guys who played in a much larger NHL with likely far far more available talent to compete with. That’s the problem. I’m not even saying the modern guy should always win the comparison but it’s quite clear many here aren’t adding this context and/or simply give the legends from the “golden era” special status.

No one will ever produce a perfect list, and things like Mario and Roy being born on the same day happen, so who knows. It’s just super extremely unlikely pre-baby boom Canada would produce as many top 10 players all-time as baby-boom and post baby-boom Canada with the US and Europe joining in producing elite players as well as we've all witnessed. I think people need to admit this to some degree at least if they want to have any credibility as someone trying to veiew the history of hockey and the NHL. It's really that glaringly obvious.

 

[wetcoast]

That's exactly the point I was making in my post when I said the League expanded (70s) but it didn't get any deeper.

Okay I must have misread that as it wasn't all that clear and for the record the 70's, 80s and 90s were entirely different decades in terms of the talent in the NHL, maybe lumping the 70's and 80s was a bit unclear in that rearguard.

 

[frisco]

Jagr.

My Best-Carey

 

[SCampo98]

Beliveau for me. The impact he had on the Canadiens, the long-period of time he was dominant, and the amount to which he was an amazing ambassador for the game and perhaps the game's greatest gentleman, place him at #5 for me. Crosby is close though, right at #6 for me.

 

[Professor What]

Jagr has worked his way into my number five spot. He had a high peak, a long prime, and his longevity falls shy of only Howe among forwards. Save for that last season, he was effective the whole way. The longevity factor has kind of turned into the tiebreaker for me over some of the other strong candidates.

 

[Sentinel]

You might be higher than all of us.

I am, actually, quite sympathetic to the idea that Hasek should be ranked higher than Lemieux, or at least on the same level.

 

[tinyzombies]

Morenz may have been no greater than Shore.

Heck, a case can be made (based on his contemporaries' opinions) that Nighbor was better.

There have been several threads on this. 99% of comments indicate that Morenz was the best player until maybe Howe. Lots of contemporaries during the Rocket's time weren't sure between the two. Morenz did more but Rocket's goalscoring in the clutch... but again the player pool wasn't as large, etc. And Morenz also came up big when it mattered (it was revealed he was injured during 1930 playoff run, that's why his stats were down).

Does that put him near #5? He only played 25 years before Hull, 20 from Beliveau, 15 from Harvey and only 10 from near his peak before Rocket started to emerge. King Clancy is one of maybe only two prominent figures who ranked Morenz with Orr, but if you read Clancy's book you'll see he enjoys a yarn. But what is interesting is they are comparing Morenz DIRECTLY to those players, not as some comparison to his own era. Is that enough to put him in the group of "5"?

In the few clips we have of him, he probably has the most modern skating technique - along with maybe Boucher - from back then, especially in his crossovers and acceleration, which is stunning looking at the skates they had to use. The one major question mark is we don't know what kind of playmaker he could have been under different rules. He was geared his entire life to playing a certain way and going end-to-end.

There is a way to test how fast he was and hopefully someone does it someday. His best time carrying the puck 190 yards (2 football fields almost) was 17 seconds according to those speed competitions he won (Hec Kilrea held the record from those years (tho it's hard to tell as they were timing it by eye). Maybe in all the AS videos we have there is a way to compare that to one of the events and do a calculation? Or to even carry out this experiment yourself and then skate the entire rink the way they do at the skills competition and then extrapolate?