Give me your unpopular hockey opinions

[SmellOfVictory]

I have a lot of them. Here's one:



Also a bunch more. Don't judge me.

Player specific:
- Brodeur was nothing more than a very good goalie on an elite defensive team.
- Quick was at best an average goalie on an elite defensive team.
- Johnny Gaudreau will be the league's best winger for the next decade.
- Gretzky would struggle to crack 80 points in today's NHL.
- Jacob Slavin will be a franchise player - he is the best U23 defenseman on the planet.
- Mike Ribeiro is criminally underrated and has been his entire career.
- Sean Monahan and Mark Giordano are criminally overrated.

General
- Hitting does not help teams win hockey games
- Coaching in such a way that intentionally manipulates possession numbers (shooting from everywhere) does not help teams win hockey games
- Teams shouldn't over-value 2 way play in a draft prospect. It is far easier to teach a smart, skilled, competitive scorer to play defense than it is to teach a middling 2 way player how to create offense.
- There is no need for bottom 6 players to play any different stylistically than top 6 players. One dimensional offensive forwards who score 10-20 more points per year typically will win you more games well rounded comparable.
- It doesn't require high point totals to be a good offensive defenseman. Guys who can escape a forecheck and move the puck quickly up to the forwards don't usually get tons of points, but they would have tons of tertiary and quaternary assists. Doughty, Larsson, Slavin, and Russel are great examples of these types of dmen.
- Anything beyond 2-3 years of NHL experience is overrated.
- I find Pierre McGuire tolerable *cringe*.

Rule specific:
- Nets should be 6-12 inches wider, which would IMO give an advantage to smaller, more mobile goaltenders.
- Interference around the net needs to be a penalty. Just because an forward is standing near the crease doesn't mean he's allowed to get slashed, shoved, and cross checked.
- League should actively attempt to remove as many off sides stoppages as possible - make all offsides plays result in change of possession where the offending team has to leave the puck and tag at the red line.


And finally . . .
- HFBoards is extremely underrated. Yea, there are some crap posters and plenty of poor discussion if you go looking for it. But there are many high quality posters on this site who could scout / analyze / manage hockey better than most who are paid handsomely to do so - appeal to authority is stupid in such a nepotistic system.

I'd say your Brodeur opinion is not as unpopular as it seems; a lot of people would agree with you on that (and in the same vein: Osgood was a slightly-above-average goalie who benefited from playing on an amazing team).

 

[BruinDust]

I don't know if it's an unpopular opinion.

But to me, the advent/evolution of shot-blocking is the single biggest epidemic problem in today's game. This sport was never meant to have to shoot through 3-4-5 extra bodies to put the puck on net. Last year's finals to me was a competition as to which team could block the most shots and was a snooze-fest.

And shot-blocking doesn't sell tickets or draw ratings. Never has, never will.

Other than moving the blue-lines back to where they were (as suggested by Scotty Bowman) as a way to reduce teams using a collapsing defense and force wingers to cover the point-men closely again, I don't know how the league fixes the problem.

I also don't know if this is unpopular.

But the 2-ref system absolutely ******.

Why is it with by adding another ref, has the quality gone down the tubes, oh and gets worse/less consistent, every passing year?

If they want two refs out there, make on a umpire, and separate each guys responsibility, instead of having two refs out there doing the same job and trying to one-up each other.

Or just go back to the one-ref system that worked perfectly fine for almost a century.

 

[End on a Hinote]

When the Shea Weber trade happened I thought Nashville lost hard.

That opinion isn't as unpopular as you may think.

 

[Bear of Bad News]

Thousand posts.

Let's wait until there's a reason to start a new one.