Should HoH do a year by year most outstanding player?

[jigglysquishy]

The Hart Trophy is the closest in real life, but has lots of problems. Some years it goes to the literal MVP (Hall in 2018), some it goes to most outstanding player. Voting patterns have changed massively over the decades. Defensemen got lots of consideration pre 1940, but outside Orr have been largely ignored since then. So if we look at historical comparisons, Hart always has big caveats.

We could also do a just forwards award. That way, a guy like Jagr isn't punished because he peaked at the same time as Hasek.

MVP is an ambiguous term. Most outstanding is much more clear.

Click to read more...

 

[VanIslander]

Top 3.

Honor the small divides to ensure that one of the few is certainly the best of that year.

 

[daver]

The Hart Trophy is the closest in real life, but has lots of problems. Some years it goes to the literal MVP (Hall in 2018), some it goes to most outstanding player. Voting patterns have changed massively over the decades. Defensemen got lots of consideration pre 1940, but outside Orr have been largely ignored since then. So if we look at historical comparisons, Hart always has big caveats.

We could also do a just forwards award. That way, a guy like Jagr isn't punished because he peaked at the same time as Hasek.

MVP is an ambiguous term. Most outstanding is much more clear.

Most outstanding is still too ambiguous. I prefer Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence

 

[Michael Farkas]

Top 3 outstanding and, if necessary, a honorable mention MVP...?

 

[BigBadBruins7708]

I mean, with a few exceptions I feel like the Ross winner is a pretty solid indicator of best forward in a given year.

Hell, in those years that Hasek cost Jagr some Hart trophies, he did win 5 Ross trophies in 7 years

 

[jigglysquishy]

I would also like some discussion on injuries/time missed.

Ovechkin was the best player in the world during 2009-10 season, but missed out on the Hart because of the 10 games missed for injuries/suspension. He won the Pearson and he is in my mind the Most Outstanding Player that season.
Crosby was the best player in the world during 2010-11 season, but missing 41 games makes it hard for me to consider him the Most Outstanding.
Crosby was the best player in the world during 2012-13 season. He missed out on the Hart due to face-puck, but did win the Pearson. He's my vote for Most Outstanding.

As long as we're consistent I'm fine. I just don't think we should ignore excellence because of missing a few games.

 

[JackSlater]

I think that it could be interesting and I would appreciate its value if it saved even a few instances of vapid arguments put forward that are in fact nothing more than pointing to a Hart trophy. Not sure how realistic such a thing would be given how long hockey history is and the inevitability of people running out of steam.

Most outstanding is still too ambiguous. I prefer Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence

Traditionally those awards are given out by Joe Frazier, and that just isn't possible anymore.

 

[tarheelhockey]

I think this could be hugely helpful. Ideally it would be a great long-term goal to have a somewhat viable index of which players at each position were really outstanding each year. Presumably if this was something like a top-3, we would at least discuss which players from each position could be candidates for that top-3, and that discussion would be an amazing way to refine years and years of research/argument into an actual resource.

 

[vadim sharifijanov]

calendar year? season? including or not including playoffs? and, if season, on which side of a season do summer tournaments count?

 

[vadim sharifijanov]

Most outstanding is still too ambiguous. I prefer Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence

Traditionally those awards are given out by Joe Frazier, and that just isn't possible anymore.

looks like corey perry pulled a homer

 

[tarheelhockey]

calendar year? season? including or not including playoffs? and, if season, on which side of a season do summer tournaments count?

My vote would be to start the "season" on August 1st. A tournament that was already started prior to August 1st should be counted as part of the prior season, anything that starts after August 1st would be counted as part of the following season.

I think we have to include playoffs and tournaments in this. It will be a struggle to put proper weight on those games in light of the ingrained bias toward teams that make a deep playoff run, but it would be a disservice not to try.

 

[TheDevilMadeMe]

Is the goal for this to be a formal research project like the HOH top players lists?

Or more casual - such as "post your opinion in this thread"?

Something in between?

 

[Michael Farkas]

Formality would add some structure to the process and enhance potential results...

 

[jigglysquishy]

Is the goal for this to be a formal research project like the HOH top players lists?

Or more casual - such as "post your opinion in this thread"?

Something in between?

I would love a HoH player list style, but I don't know if people have the energy to do every NHL season that way.

 

[Michael Farkas]

The answer might be to start from a date...let's say, 1910...and work our way forward. We'll cover more interesting ground before attrition and attention spans kick in...

Though, a more macro thing might be a hockey research wiki all together...we have so many threads "pre-1950 goaltender research thread", tarheel has some threads of like the 1920's, BM67 has all these goalie stat things by year, HockeyOutsider, pnep, etc. have mountains of data, we have the ATD bios, etc. Sanf appears to be some sort of multi-lingual, human-library hybrid or something...

But like, I posted today in the ancient video thread a small excerpt about a race that NHL players took place in and it got right down to the specifics of the race...I've never seen that excerpt before (that's not the point of this, it might be out there a thousand times over) and if that's the only spot that it's in, it's not obvious when you're looking for Babe Seibert quotes...ya know?

I don't know, I'm sorry I'm distracting from the thread, but it just got me thinking that this kind of project - like many of them - is the culmination of so much research and while the voting records and goalie stats and VsX and all that is consolidated in an orderly manner, there's so much that isn't that would make a project like this go by faster...

Like, if we had it organized, we could do a 3 or 5 day jaunt for year or two where we'd mostly be accruing new data...

I don't know, sorry, back to the thread at hand...this is a pie in the sky organization effort that we probably don't have the resources to accomplish...

 

[vadim sharifijanov]

The answer might be to start from a date...let's say, 1910...and work our way forward. We'll cover more interesting ground before attrition and attention spans kick in...

just as a thought experiment, it would be super interesting to see how the ends, or even middles, of the list would be different depending on whether we go chronologically or backwards.

 

[daver]

How many seasons out of the last 40 would we say that the Hart or Lindsay winner would not be the pick? Two maybe.

 

[jigglysquishy]

I think that in the last 20 years the Lindsay award has been awarded better than the Hart.

Examples

1) Jagr over Pronger in 2000 (nothing against Pronger, but winning the Art Ross in 63 games is insane)
2) Jagr over Thornton in 2006 (both great seasons, but I think Jagr was the better player that year)
3) Ovechkin over Malkin in 2009
4) Crosby over Ovechkin in 2013
5) McDavid over Hall in 2018

The issue being that the Lindsay gets pretty messy pre-1990s. So we don't have an apples to apples comparison. It would be nice if we could point to a 1910-2021 list of best player (or best forward if we go that direction) as a comparative means.

If we do best forwards, then a guy like Jagr looks much better. Either 5 or 6 best-forward awards compared to 1 Hart is a huge difference.

I would love the debates of 1988-89, 1994-95, 2002-2003.

If we are doing forwards-only, the Orr and Shore years become fascinating. And any of the years the goalie won the Hart.

 

[tarheelhockey]

I would love a HoH player list style, but I don't know if people have the energy to do every NHL season that way.

I would tend to agree... I want to do a formal project but I don't think it would be successful in the same way that the listmaking projects have been. We're talking about over 100 installments, over what really couldn't be less than several years. It's probably too much to even expect anyone to administer a formal project of that scale, before we even get into the participant side of things.

IMO it might be better to just get the ball rolling with the first thread, then let the project live or die on the momentum of the people who are most interested. I did something similar in 5-year increments last year leading up to the top-200 list... see here and here, maybe it will provide some insight on the strengths and weaknesses of that approach.

The answer might be to start from a date...let's say, 1910...and work our way forward. We'll cover more interesting ground before attrition and attention spans kick in...

Though, a more macro thing might be a hockey research wiki all together...we have so many threads "pre-1950 goaltender research thread", tarheel has some threads of like the 1920's, BM67 has all these goalie stat things by year, HockeyOutsider, pnep, etc. have mountains of data, we have the ATD bios, etc. Sanf appears to be some sort of multi-lingual, human-library hybrid or something...

But like, I posted today in the ancient video thread a small excerpt about a race that NHL players took place in and it got right down to the specifics of the race...I've never seen that excerpt before (that's not the point of this, it might be out there a thousand times over) and if that's the only spot that it's in, it's not obvious when you're looking for Babe Seibert quotes...ya know?

I don't know, I'm sorry I'm distracting from the thread, but it just got me thinking that this kind of project - like many of them - is the culmination of so much research and while the voting records and goalie stats and VsX and all that is consolidated in an orderly manner, there's so much that isn't that would make a project like this go by faster...

Like, if we had it organized, we could do a 3 or 5 day jaunt for year or two where we'd mostly be accruing new data...

I don't know, sorry, back to the thread at hand...this is a pie in the sky organization effort that we probably don't have the resources to accomplish...

My impression is that this has been discussed and rejected several times before.

To be honest, the idea of HFBoards going offline someday is terrifying to me. It would be like watching a museum burn. The loss of data during the server transition was like a wake-up call that we have all put massive amounts of irreplaceable information on here with no guarantee that it will be there next time we log in. There really should be a plan, and I'd be on board to participate in curation of whatever it is that would work best.

 

[Dingo]

oh yes, very much, please.

I can go back and find the best consensus dman or goalie for 80yrs, but i cant for forwards. Id like you guys to do this, and id also like to see it retroactive to at least as long as most of you have been cognizant (80s?), or further

 

[The Panther]

I did a thread something like this a year ago, which I defined as "best performer" from 1990 to 2004:
Best NHL Performer each season 1990 to 2004

 

[Dingo]

I did a thread something like this a year ago, which I defined as "best performer" from 1990 to 2004:
Best NHL Performer each season 1990 to 2004

nice work.

I REALLY like this, because...


I am all about peak

I hate trying to see eye to eye with people about “lack of depth in a league” which goes hand in hand with arguing about the gaps between the best and next best.

regardless of what the league was like, if you make the top 3 in the world in a year, you were awesome... if you do it twice in your career, then it wasnt a fluke and you automatically make my Hall of Excellence.

although, to be fair, 1970-1990 might need to have some Euros/WHA players knocking on the top 3.... hard as that is to compare

 

[Hockey Outsider]

I think that in the last 20 years the Lindsay award has been awarded better than the Hart.

Examples

1) Jagr over Pronger in 2000 (nothing against Pronger, but winning the Art Ross in 63 games is insane)
2) Jagr over Thornton in 2006 (both great seasons, but I think Jagr was the better player that year)
3) Ovechkin over Malkin in 2009
4) Crosby over Ovechkin in 2013
5) McDavid over Hall in 2018

The issue being that the Lindsay gets pretty messy pre-1990s. So we don't have an apples to apples comparison. It would be nice if we could point to a 1910-2021 list of best player (or best forward if we go that direction) as a comparative means.

If we do best forwards, then a guy like Jagr looks much better. Either 5 or 6 best-forward awards compared to 1 Hart is a huge difference.

I would love the debates of 1988-89, 1994-95, 2002-2003.

If we are doing forwards-only, the Orr and Shore years become fascinating. And any of the years the goalie won the Hart.

The Hart and Lindsay/Pearson have given different results 8 times in the past ~30 years. They can be neatly categorized into three types of explanations:

• The players voted for someone on a non-playoff team, while the Hart voters didn't - this explains 2002 (Iginla over Theodore) and 2018 (McDavid over Hall)
• The players were more willing to overlook someone missing around a quarter of the season, while the Hart voters weren't - this explains 2000 (Jagr over Pronger), 2010 (Ovechkin over H. Sedin) and 2013 (Crosby over Ovechkin)
• The players vote before the end of the season so a player boosted by a late-season hot streak gets short-changed for the Lindsay - this explains 2003 (Naslund over Forsberg - who took the Art Ross from Naslund, helped his linemate Hejduk to take Naslund's would-be Richard, and helped the Avalanche take the division title from Vancouver, all in the last couple of days of the season), 2006 (Jagr over Thornton - not quite as extreme but Thornton took the Art Ross from Jagr, and helped his linemate Cheechoo take the Richard from Jagr, in the last week of the season), and 2011 (Perry had a ridiculous hot streak during the last month, and that streak might be enough to get him into the Hall of Fame).

 

[Professor What]

Two questions:

1) If this were done as an official project, could it be handled, say, five years at a time? That would drastically speed things up but theoretically, it shouldn't be too much of a load at one time.

2) Would it be NHL only, or would Soviets, etc., be included? If it were top 3, as @Dingo said, there could be some candidates.

 

[tarheelhockey]

2) Would it be NHL only, or would Soviets, etc., be included? If it were top 3, as @Dingo said, there could be some candidates.

IMO, it’s only worthwhile if it includes the whole hockey world. That means not only Soviets but also PCHA, WHA, etc. We make a lot more progress in comparing those players than we do in quibbling over Hart rankings.