i was thinking about this randomly in the shower this morning: it's going to sound crazy but can you make an argument that tikkanen and neely are equals?
they both were excellent players with a niche skillset: goal scoring power winger and shutdown defensive pest. both were historically good, and arguably paradigmatic, at those roles.
neely has four all-star offensive regular seasons to his name, and you can probably say there's a five year period where he's the second best RW in the league, behind peak brett hull. tikkanen has four selke nominations, and you can probably say there's a five year period where he's the second best defensive forward in the league. then both guys had some injury/worn out down years before having one last big year ('94 for neely, '95 in STL for tik).
in their primes, both had wonderful team-carrying playoff runs, to go with good contributions to other deep runs. neely was huge in '90 and '91 and very likely isn't in the HHOF without those years; in those exact same years, tikkanen has two very historically underrated playoff runs and comes a mere four points shy of neely (over 40 games for both), while taking on and killing enormous defensive responsibilities. neely also has '88 while tikkanen has a better '88, and of course a bunch of other deep runs that neely can't match (though when we get into tikkanen's 4th, 5th, and 6th deep runs we can start to talk about the advantage he had playing with the oilers/new york neo-oilers).
neely confounded patrick roy three times and we love him to death for it. well in 1990 tikkanen outscored gretzky 4 goals to 1 (no assists for either guy that series) while of course shadowing him and being the primary reason gretzky had such a quiet series offensively. in the rematch, tikkanen outscored gretzky 6 points to 5 (all assists for gretzky), en route to a six game victory. after LA won game one, off a gretzky-assisted OT goal, tikkanen assisted on the 2OT game two winner and then scored the OT winner in game three to take control of the series. in the deciding game six, tikkanen scored the late third period goal that sent the game to OT, where mactavish eventually won it. in their third straight meeting, gretzky outscored tikkanen 7 points to 4, but again tikkanen had the upper hand, taking the series in six. gretzky brutalized tikkanen for four assists in game 2, but tik held gretzky scoreless in three other games; in gretzky's other noteworthy game (2 goals, the only ones he scored all series), tikkanen bested him with a hat trick. neely vs. roy and tikkanen vs. gretzky... those should be comparable accomplishments right?
they were born in the same year, their careers almost exactly overlapped, and tikkanen in fact played 150 more regular season games than neely (managing 64 fewer career regular season points). and of course tikkanen's role was primarily defensive, while neely's main job was to score points.
14th all-time in playoff goals, 41st all-time in playoff points, 24th all-time playoff games played (era-specific accomplishments, yes, but still). a very versatile player who check, agitate, score, make plays, anything you needed. i'll leave it for someone else to corroborate but i feel like he even played some center in the '91 playoffs.
Or perhaps if you take the "Fame" part really seriously, I could see TikiTalk alone being worth some serious consideration.
