His skating WITH the puck. There's a difference between pure figure skater types and guys that can skate with the puck.
Killing penalties by himself by skating back and forth on the ice made his opponents look silly. His penalty killing broke all the rules. A shorthanded player is supposed to skate up the ice toward his opponent's end, and when opposing checkers got close to him he was supposed to dump it in and then turn back to defend or do a line change.
Orr would skate up, and when guys converged on him, he'd all of a sudden turn back toward his own end unexpectedly, sometimes even going all the way back behind his own net. The he'd skate up ice again and again turn back when his opponents least expected it. He really looked like a man among boys.
Absolutely. Those of us who saw him probably remember this more than anything else — Orr was like an instructor at a hockey camp in a playful game of keepaway with 5 tykes. I won’t swear to this, but sometimes I think he was actually smiling as the seconds ticked off the clock.
Interestingly, there are very few clips of Orr skating backwards at full speed in a classic D-man posture, maintaining gap control and using his stick to break up plays. It’s fairly easy to find clips of Fetisov’s dazzling backwards skating, but not so with Orr. So often Orr defended while skating forwards, which sounds bizarre but was highly effective because he’d be right on his man and usually angle him into the boards and strip the puck. Part of this technique was based on Orr’s ability to hold the offensive blue line better than any defenceman I’ve ever seen — if he did get beaten there, all he needed was 2-3 strides to recover and he’d pick the opponent’s pocket and have the puck again.
We don’t see defencemen who kill penalties or defend like this. Total “wow” factor.
Edit: just for fun, watch a clip of game 3 in the 1987 Canada Cup, the 4th Soviet goal that puts them up 4-2 (I think it’s right near the end of the first period). A Canada powerplay just ended. Gretzky, Lemieux, Messier, Bourque and Coffey are out the whole time. The Soviets eventually clear the puck out of their own zone and Bourque retrieves it at his own blue line.
Bourque tried a spin move and simply falls down — there’s no profound pressure on him at all. The Soviet player, I think it was Khomutov, is utterly gifted a breakaway and beats Fuhr.
Bourque was a very fine skater, but I cannot imagine Orr falling on an open ice spin move with no genuine pressure on him in any game, let alone one so important. That’s the difference between the best skating defenceman in history and someone from that tier one step down.
