If you're going to discount everyone elses accomplishments because they occured XX number of years ago then its pretty pointless to try and rank a player all time.
Considering Langway was the last pure defensive player to win the Norris in 25 years will people be saying the Norris winner from 1985-2010 didnt go to the best defenseman but one who put up big points.
i'm not discounting anyone's accomplishments. i think shore was the best player of his time. i am discounting the notion that the hart trophy winner was always the best player.
if you had been paying attention, i've just been saying that most valuable to his team was much more important in hart voting than it is today. i didn't think it was so controversial.
if hart was same as best player, why for example was rollins not a 1st or 2nd all-star when he won the hart or when he was runner-up? how did the 1st all-star RW, art ross and richard winner, from the top team in 1934 finish behind 3 players from the 2nd all-star team and behind 1 player who wasn't an all-star (and possibly other players)?
why are hart-winning, multiple all-star, SC-winning dmen like goodfellow and siebert almost never considered top 10 all-time dmen?
is it a coincidence that dmen finished in top 5 in hart voting much more in the early NHL than after the war? or that 5 of the 7 dmen who won the hart trophy played in the early NHL?
from 1926-38 a dman was always a finalist; often 2 or 3 were dmen. in that span, 17 of the 38 finalists were dmen. (even if shore is removed from the voting it is still 12.)
i don't think many would say that about the norris, since langway may have been the only purely defensive dman to win (norris winners almost always put up big points.), and because all norris winners in that span other than maybe coffey were somewhere from good to excellent defensively.