Hockey Outsider said:
Overall I'd find it hard to give Langway the Norris in '83 or '84. He was on the ice for approximately the same number of goals as Coffey and was outscored by 75 pts per year. The "subjective" factors don't give him a strong enough boost to overcome his deficit in scoring.
Outstanding analysis. The main question is how do you judge a players contributions. The starting point is how much success your team has, the whole point is winning the game. But if you`re going to have more success if your teammates are better. The best method I`ve seen is Bill James Win Shares system for baseball. He gives each team 3 shares for every game they win and then divies up the shares based on how much each player contributed. The guy with the most shares in the league is the best player. This way the primary goal of winning is rewarded, but it`s still possible to do well if you`re agreat player on a lousy team (i.e. A-Rod with Texas.)
How do you apply it to hockey, where the numbers aren`t as black-and-white as baseball? There`s several systems out there from Iian Fyffe, Alan Ryder as well as the on your site. I`ve tried my own but a weakness with math and spreadsheet knowledge made me give up, but if we take the general logic behind the Win Shares system, we can see that Langway was far better than his stats would indicate.
For example the `84 season:
Washington did very well with 101 points- 5th overall. They finished 11th offensively, but 1st defensively. So obviously the majority of Washington`s success was due to their defence. Their goalies were Pat Riggin and Al Jensen; capable but not spectacular. Neither were in the top 5 in save %. However, the Caps defence gave up less shots than any other team.
So we have a team that was very successful, primarily due to it`s defence whose success was due more to its players than its goalies. But which players get the credit? Here`s where Langway comes in.
The best starting point is which players were on the ice the most- most ice-time estimates would give Langway close to 28 min. That gets even better when you consider that he didn`t play much on the power-play, so that icetime lead at evenstrength and shorthanded becomes even larger. Washington had the top penalty-killing % that year, Langway led the team in PK ice time. He led the team in ES ice time, and as his point totals show it wasn`t because of his offence so it had to be because of his defence.
All this points to the fact that Langway was the top contributor on one of the best teams that season. As for Coffey, he contributed a lot of offence an even better team who`s success was due to its` offence. But was he Edmonton`s top offensive contributor?
Gretzky 87 goals, 118 assists, 205 pts.
Coffey 40 goals, 86 assists, 126 pts.
No he wasn`t.
There`s been lots of other defencemen who had similar years to Langways that were never Norris candidates. Why him? Before his Norris wins the last two winners were Doug Wilson and Randy Carlyle; good but hardly great defencemen who only won because of high point totals. It was the era of 8-5 games and contrary to current belief it wasn`t great hockey; a lot of it was ridiculously sloppy. Anyways, there was a lot of complaining that defensive play wasn`t being recognized in the Norris voting so it was accepted that barring a miraculous Orr-like offensive season, the next Norris would go to the top defensive defenceman, who happened to be Langway. When the Caps became a top team the following year for the reasons previously listed, it was logical that Langway would repeat.
Not trying to take anything away from Langway but those very same seasons wouldn`t have been recognized by Norris voters five years earlier, and without those Norris trophies, considering he had no lengthy playoff run in his prime, he wouldn`t get in the Hall.