Ray Ferraro made a comment the other night during the Leaf game when Matthews made a nifty move. He said when he was playing not a single guy would even think to try a move like that or moves that the top players make almost nightly. It's only been in the last 10 years or so this new level of creativity is thriving.
Ray Ferraro is a broadcaster and is paid money to gush over today's game, and shill for its players. It's literally his job. One should never take hyperbolic stuff like this for gospel. Wayne Gretzky at some point said everyone was the best player ever.
Hockey in the 80s and 90s had tons of nifty players. Mario Lemieux. Denis Savard. Peter Stastny. Rick "Nifty" Middleton. Wayne Gretzky. Kent "Magic Man" Nilsson. Pat Lafontaine. Pavel Bure. Jaromir Jagr. Et cetera. Et cetera.
Kent Nilsson for instance was famous for his crossbar challenge where he would hit the crossbar from center ice in practice, with a slapshot.
According to Brett Hull in his autobiography, Nilsson, while playing for the Winnipeg Jets with Bobby Hull in the late 1970s, would challenge young Brett and his brothers that he could hit 7 out of 10 crossbars from center ice, and then he hit 8 or 9 out of 10.
And, if you don't want to take Hull's words for gospel either, which perhaps you probably shouldn't, Nilsson later on went on a TV segment in Calgary where the producers challenged him to hit just 1 out of 5 tries. He famously hit it with the first try, and then skated off. The key point is that Nilsson was super skilled. While playing in Atlanta with the Flames before the team relocated to Canada, Nilsson also picked up golf and became a scratch/semi-pro level player.
Johnny Gaudreau and Sean Monahan tried to replicate Nilsson's crossbar challenge a few years back, and failed. Gaudreau finally hit the bar with his 5th and final puck, while Monahan couldn't get a single one. And isn't Gaudreau considered one of the niftier players in the game today?
There are obviously very skilled guys in the league today too, like there are in any generation, but the notion that creativity is something that just came around in the last 10 years is just plain absurd.
I would even say the speed increase in the game the last 5 or so years has seen a setback in overall creativity, because far from everyone in the league can handle the puck at such speed. You often see players mishandling the puck at full speed in today's game, with pucks bouncing here, there and everywhere like it's some pinball game.
The most stick-skilled players in today's game are still the players who are able to find space to slow down the pace and thread needles. Like Patrick Kane.
The NHL today has a lot more men to draw from as potential hockey players, due to being able to attract talent from countries across the world, as well as the fact that the population of all these countries are way higher then the were a in 1920.
Ice hockey is still the same niche sport today as it was in the 80s & 90s, more or less. NHL today doesn't draw talent from "across the world", that's a delusional pipe dream. Yeah, I guess they potentially
could draw all that talent, but they aren't. Unless with "across the world" you mean a few smaller hockey countries in Europe like Slovenia, Switzerland, Germany and Denmark.
By the way, the recent influx of talent from countries like Slovenia (Kopitar), Switzerland (Josi, Hischier, Niederraiter, Fiala, Meier), Germany (Draisaitl) and Denmark (Eller) is also more or less mitigated on a whole by the fact that a country like Slovakia has seen a steep decline in talent output since the 90s. In the 90s/early 00s they had players like Ziggy Palffy, Peter Bondra, Pavol Demitra, Marian Hossa, Miroslav Satan, Marian Gaborik, Zdeno Chara, and a bunch of other depth guys like Michal Handzus, Josef Stümpel, et cetera. Now they have Tomas Tatar and Richard Panik, and nothing else.