Keenan owned tikhonov in the 87 Canada cup
How so? Because he was a slave to rolling 4 lines? Maybe he was, but it's easily arguable that it worked. Consider that, if you list the forwards, defensemen, and goalies on each squad, the Canadian players are significantly better at every spot, except #1 defensemen, where Bourque and Fetisov were pretty close. That Tikhonov had that team competing with Gretzky/Messier/Lemieux/Bourque/Coffey/Murphy/Anderson/Fuhr/Gilmour and on and on and on, speaks volumes on his ability to make a team better than the sum of its parts.
Without doing any math, Clint Smith appears to me to be almost as good as Pierre turgeon. (smith has much better scoring finishes but it was a much weaker era).
....Well, he's good, and he's got a better offensive record than
some 2nd line centers, but Turgeon isn't one of them. You are a proponent of "doubling" pre-expansion finishes, and that alone would put Smith behind Turgeon (if you ignore 1944 and 1945, which you probably should*, and then the years before and after that were pretty weak too), but that is a bit too simplistic for me.
* although I am thinking of working out a formula that can properly credit players like Smith and Syd Howe and Toe Blake with "percentage" scores for the war years by predicting the point totals of the elite forwards who went to war, based on what percentage players like these usually scored compared to them, averaging it out, and giving the absent players imaginary point totals that other lesser players can then use for percentage scores. (that looks really wordy, so here's an example - suppose the formula determines that if Lorne Carr scored 74 points, Max Bentley was a 95-point player by that standard, and Lynn Patrick was a 78-point scorer and so on, then rewrite the leaderboards, determine who the hypothetical #2 is, and assign percentage scores based on who the hypothetical - almost certainly absent - #2 scorer would be in those seasons) - personally, I think it's genius; the best way we have so far for appropriately crediting ww2 players with at least something for those seasons.
Anyway, Smith's best "percentage" seasons (I'll stop at 8 seasons as there is a big dropoff there):
96 93 78* 74 63 61* 57 56
* = WW2 years estimated using the above premise
Turgeon's best 8 (no outliers removed)
89* 82 78 77* 77 75 70 69
*these two years would become 93 & 87 with obvious and serious outliers removed.
* 1989 and 1996, with scores of 52 & 64 (not shown in top-8 above) would be 86 & 81 with serious and ovbious outliers & outlier creations removed. (after all that, he'd look like this: 93 87 86 82 81 78 77 75)
I don't think Smith brought anything more away from the puck than Turgeon did, either.
I don't think he's very close as a player, but where you got him, he's a much better value (basically twice as far down the draft, and he's obviously much more than half the player Turgeon is - more like 85%). Smith is always an excellent value for whoever takes him. Like Bowie, someone should plan all along to take Smith in the 2nd line center slot, after grabbing two strong wingers, and filling up the 3rd line and top-5 D.
With my three skipped picks..
D: Clem Loughlin
LW: Georges Mantha
RW: Tony Amonte
I'm pretty "meh" about Mantha, but Loughlin and Amonte are excellent picks. Amonte was one of the four guys I said was arguably the best offensive forward available when TDMM took Smith (and I still can't say for sure which of the four is best)
