I would love pre-consolidation, but I really think it's going to be *hard*. Also there's a *bit* of a question as to what about guys who played on both sides of it (as in would we be able to keep their NHL careers distinct from their pre-NHL exploits).
It would also probably do the most for increasing the collective knowledge of the board though, and that's a worthy goal.
I'd go 1. Next Best 100; 2. Best pre-consolidation, 3. HOH HOF (although I think the format of this matters *a lot* for it to be worthwhile - a bad format and it's worse than useless).
The rest.
We've never had much of an issue with that before I don't think, we can make a general guidance...my main issue with it is the accessibility and wild randominity of a prelim list...I don't know if I could make a top-10 pre-consolidation list with any assuredness...was my top 120 perfect? No. But was it reasonable in my own head? Yes. In a pinch, did it really cause players to come up for discussion in a disorderly way? No.
I know that Sidney Crosby was better then Zdeno Chara...I know that Martin Brodeur was better than, ya know, basically all of them...so that was "easy"...
I don't
know that Percy LeSeuer (sp?) was better than Hugh Lehman and was worse than Art Ross or any of that...forgetting the numbers themselves, my #2 could be completely unranked on someone's list...I could have 13 of my top 20 not appear in anyone else's top 20, ya know? That's my only real concern...
I want this to collectively build our knowledge...to use an agile/scrum term, we might want to work this as a "spike" first and foremost, and a list secondarily, including the preliminary list...we might want to handle this (if it goes through) a little bit differently to make it more researcher friendly and less intimidating, for lack of a better term...the prelim list with even a few weeks of lead-up time might be too daunting and/or might cause us to just re-tread over already established knowledge...and I think the ultimate goal here is to expand our pre-War knowledge...
While I'm rambling, we might want to get creative about the lead-up...one idea that just popped into my home-happy-hour-has-started brain is we split into groups or individuals or whatever and we're responsible for finding information about a team or a city and do a run through of information we can unearth that way, present it that with no debate, and then form prelim lists, then carry on as usual...
So, let's say we get something larger than Kenora here, let's say TDMM, benchbrawl, and I get Ottawa...we scour whatever Ottawa resources we can find, dig up quotes, stats, etc. and at the first intermission we present our findings for the group...maybe 70s, tinyzombies, boxscore have non-Canadiens Montreal teams and they present what they found on players into the same thread at the same time...et cetera...and then we go, "ok, three weeks from now, let's put together a prelim list of 50..." and we administer it as normal from there, though, maybe even at a slightly slower pace as to allow for more research - as there's no video to watch here...
I don't know just throwing it out there...
