danincanada
Registered User
- Feb 11, 2008
- 2,809
- 354
By the way, does anyone have historical numbers of registered players in Canada? I could not find anything from before the 2000s. That would illustrate quite clearly how soft the competition was back then.
There was a nice rundown of it floating around before but I'm not sure if it still exists after the format change on these boards. It was done by a poster named BraveCanadian. If you take those raw numbers at face value then it backs up a lot of your points but most posters in this section will just say the registration system was different back then and/or that everyone played pond hockey so it didn't matter.
I don't know about Howe being the most overrated player of all-time, but I do think the Original 6 in general gets very overrated here. Only really Canadians playing in the league, and those Canadians came from a small population with fairly low birth rates and it wasn't even all of Canada. The league expanded because they sport started to expand. North America had a baby boom and the Soviets started to really show their stuff, and they weren't even in the NHL. It's quite a stretch to compare that with the international NHL of today and pretend they are on equal footing in terms of how many great players are in each era.