Dennis Bonvie
Registered User
i do believe i was responding to the one line team argument thrown about in the foregoing
OK.
But your post wasn't a response to any post.
Thus my confusion.
i do believe i was responding to the one line team argument thrown about in the foregoing
When Clarke was winning trophies he was among 5 hall of famers.
Dionne played with two, a friggin' goalie (not gonna help score) and a defenseman who left town quickly as a youth.
???
he was 4th in scoring on the 1980 and 1981 teams
i.e., an excellent second line contributor. again, responding to this idea that dionne never had anyone to help him share the scoring load
???
he was 4th in scoring on the 1980 and 1981 teams
i.e., an excellent second line contributor. again, responding to this idea that dionne never had anyone to help him share the scoring load
i only count parent (also a goalie) and barber for clarke, and only vachon for dionne. who am i missing?
It's so refreshing to hear hockey players say something honest for a change. (I wish McDavid had been saying this a few years ago.)"When I don't have the puck, we're not going to win."
It's so refreshing to hear hockey players say something honest for a change. (I wish McDavid had been saying this a few years ago.)
That 1980-81 Kings' season was such an outlier, with the 99 points. They followed it with a .393 season in 1981-82! (Only a 36-point drop in the standings)
This is where I point out that rookie Larry Murphy was +1 in that 10-3 loss to the Rangers.
Which one do people consider the better playmaker?
It may be close, but I prefer Clarke, even though the statistics (assists per game or whatever) might not support it. I just recently quickly rewatched game 3 of the 1972 Summit Series and the young Clarke centering Paul Henderson and Ron Ellis and just thought to myself, "Damn, that guy was simply a natural playmaker!"... brilliant hockey vision and passing skills; also thus his truly nasty qualities really p*ss me off.
(Do you want to break an opposition's ankle? Ice Clarke.)
Coach Bob Berry left after the 1980-81 season for Montreal. Sometimes coaching changes end badly. Charlie Simmer was hurt in 1982, also.
My impression is that it was never really about support scoring. Aside from Goring, Dionne was also skating with Charlie Simmer and Dave Taylor. Guys who were certainly boosted by playing with Dionne, but who were still pretty O.K. players in their own right.
To me the issue is the Kings as a whole were just not a well constructed team. While Dionne was at his Hart-contending peak, who was their best defenseman? Gary Sargent? Jerry Korab? Doug Halward? The simply irresistible Robert Palmer? That's not exactly a murderer's row. And in net, he got a taste of late Rogie Vachon, but his peak coincided with the Mario Lessard years. And after that, the living nightmare that was playing in front of Gary Laskoski.
If one game sums up the Dionne-era Kings: in 1981, LA was a 99-point team which was by far their best record with Dionne. They get matched up with a 74-point Rangers team and you have to think this is Dionne's window to do something in the playoffs. They narrowly drop the first game of a 5-game series. Game 2, Dionne has a goal and an assist in a win. So the spotlight is on the crucial third game.
First period, Dionne picks up an assist 1:13 into the game for a 1-0 lead. Lessard almost immediately lets in a softie from behind the net to make it 1-1. Dionne picked up a second assist at 2:48 to make it 2-1. Clearly you've got a guy out there generating points at a pace that should get his team over the hump, right?
Five minutes later, the Rangers score the first of NINE straight goals. Final score 10-3. Now, I freely admit I have not watched this game and cannot say the blame wasn't on Dionne. But nine straight goals. It's inconceivable to me that the guy who had just reeled off 4 points in under 60 minutes was suddenly so ineffective that he caused his team to surrender nine straight goals. Jay Wells and Rick Chartraw were on the ice for eight of those, which has to be some sort of record.
So you turn your attention to the start of the next game, right?
This video is handy because it starts with Game 3 highlights, so you can see what a hot burning mess the Kings were defensively and the kind of performance they were carrying into the elimination game. Then you pick up in the first minute of Game 4, at 1:20, and it just speaks for itself.
Rangers goalie Steve Baker was quoted the next day: "We tried to exploit their defensemen. Except for (Dave) Lewis, none of their guys has any mobility whatsoever. ... Maybe [Korab] was tired, but a couple of times it looked like he was kind of cruising."
And you'd think that would be the most painful quote of the postgame. But that's before you hear from a Marcel Dionne who is so pissed off that the frustration is still clear as a bell nearly 40 years later:
"When I don't have the puck, we're not going to win. We don't move the puck the way they do. They have defensemen like Greschner and Vadnais who can come right up the middle and move the puck. All we do is move it along the boards. I never had the puck once all night where I got a pass from a defenseman and could just go. Everybody is going to say, 'Dionne didn't score,' but how do they expect me to when I don't have the puck? I'd be standing there, waiting for it, ready to give it to my wingers. What am I going to do, when 30 or 40 seconds would go by? You've got to have it flowing."
That sequence of events, which are the closest thing Dionne ever had to a "chance" for playoff success, kind of sums it all up.
i haven't had a chance to watch the video yet but will find it eventually. but this sounds pretty reasonable, and a much better argument than the weak one line team and/or he played with nobody arguments.
but one thing is, dionne had his best sustained run of offensive seasons after vachon left, which also coincides with the first year of simmer/taylor, but isn't that just probably circumstance? he scored at less spectacular levels when he had a capable second line center behind him (goring) than when he was on a one line time with two all-star wingers? sounds pretty reasonable right?
and if we imagine that dionne was pretty much already the same dionne, pre-1979, which makes sense being that he finished 3rd in 1977 and 2nd in '75, i think it also makes more sense to imagine that his best window were his first three LA years, when he had vachon in vezina range and goring doing goring things.
Based on experience--there tends to be some people who really dislike Bobby Clarke's game and think he was overrated--nothing more than a hatchet man for the Bullies. And Dionne did score double the amount of goals... and is 6th all-time in scoring.
Clarke does have a huge edge in defensive play on Dionne but he also got to play in an ideal situation for his talent level and type of game.
In a vacuum across time I think Dionne is the better player overall but he gets killed around these parts for his playoff resume and the lousy teams he played for that doesn't always come across in context.
People sometimes forget that Dionne has a 16 year run as a star to superstar type of player.
I'm appreciative of JKC for getting us a team but good lord he was a terrible meddler. When he sold the Kings it was a godsend. Too bad it took us quite awhile to land a decent owner who let a hockey guy run the business.I think that's true at least of the 1976 and 1977 teams, when it seemed the Kings were on the ascendance. They had acquired Dionne to build around offensively, had Vachon in his prime, and in both years they won a playoff series before bowing out in a close series to the Cherry-era Bruins. In both of those runs, Dionne led them in the playoffs and in 1977 especially he was really very good in spite of being targeted.
For an observer at the time, it might have seemed like a window was about to open. But that was still a team with a lot of holes. They had the Dionne/Vachon duo as core stars and a decent second-tier center in Goring, but after that the roster was largely filler. That especially applies to the defense, which in particular was missing a clear #1 who could run the power play. They were not a good team defensively (Vachon covered for a lot) and their special teams suffered. Also, they were pretty soft when we consider the era.
The 1978 team was just bad, probably connected to Jack Kent Cooke getting involved with the team from the owner's suite. Cooke had a plan to trade his way to contention rather than focusing on the draft, and started making player transactions on his own initiative. That chased away both the coach and GM (Bob Pulford and Jake Milford). Cooke hired Ron Stewart as the replacement coach, and then fired him after the disastrous 1978 season.
After that they were a sub-.500 team for the rest of Dionne's time there, with the exception of the aforementioned 1981 season (99 points + playoff flameout) and an 82-point blip in 1985. Most other seasons they weren't just bad, but bad. I've never really thought of it this way till just now, but I suppose you could draw a line between the pre-1978 Dionne/Vachon/Goring teams that were painfully creeping toward contention, and the post-1978 teams that were just hopeless, and the line is Jack Kent Cooke deciding that he knew hockey better than Bob Pulford.
When Clarke was winning trophies he was among 5 hall of famers.
Dionne played with two, a friggin' goalie (not gonna help score) and a defenseman who left town quickly as a youth.
No, that "19" is not a typo. In 1974-75, Clarke scored 116 points for his team, and was on the ice for 19 goals against (ES or SH) all season. That is insane.
Now, of course some of this is team contextual, and Dionne did play on considerably weaker teams (esp. defensively) than Clarke... But then again, Clarke joined an expansion team that had no identity in 1969, and led it towards multiple Cup wins.
Dionne had a higher offensive ceiling and had a notably longer offensive prime. (He had 126 points in 1985 when Clark was a year retired.) I predict Dionne will be under-rated in this thread.
It's close, but my *expert* opinion (not having really seen either guy play!) is Clarke.
This reminds me of Andy Bathgate, who had a similar role with the Rangers and experienced similar playoff slumps.
Is it just the natural result of "isolated" stars being systematically targeted during a playoff series? I haven't looked too deeply into this.
Ideal situation? Flyers were a recent expansion team without a true #1D.
Yes, they had a great coach and great goalie.