(Son of) Top-100 Hockey Players of All-Time - Round 2, Vote 1

[ChiTownPhilly]

[Lemieux] had no peers and he is shown lack of respect, who the hell actually thinks Lemieux was not better than friggin Gordie Howe. I’m sorry but get real.

At the risk of speaking for people other than myself, I don't think the people who placed Lemieux at #4 were showing lack of respect, any more than I'm showing lack of respect for placing Bobby Orr at #4.

Now, the one wise-guy who publicly admitted that he was leaving Lemieux outside his top-4... that's another matter. [And, he didn't even name a "best-ever-at-his-position" player in his stead!]

The hockey-player has never been made, nor ever will be made, who can be compared to Gordie Howe in a manner that's breezily dismissive of Mr. Hockey.

 

[bobholly39]

...Gordie Howe outscored his closest non-teammate by 55% in 1953. Said closest non-teammate was not exactly chopped liver. If that's not dominant...

(55% is an approximate number because I made it through mental calculation. It might be 53% or 57%. I don't see this difference as being super relevant in the grand scheme of things)

Yeah I feel like most of the Mario arguments rely 100% on raw points rather than context of the eras scoring. Howes peak is still getting underrated.

Exactly.

From 51-54 combined, Howe outscored the #2 scoring by 33% (teammate Lindsay) and next closest non-teammate by 46% (Richard), and that's over a 4-year span.

Those % of domination in Art Ross wins aren't representative of his domination level. They are inflated due to:

- Lack of star power (yes I know Richard is great - but it doesn't mean he was necessarily a great point getter, every season)
- Good timing

To a smaller extent it's comparable to how Crosby's 2013-2014 season looks spectacular because of how much he beat the competition - but in an all time sense it's not necessarily that great a season, and seasons in the years prior and after are as good/better than it. This is what happened with Howe 51-54 but for 4 years straight.

If you look at PPG levels for 7 years straight it gives you a better indication of where he stands offensively.

This is an earlier post i made showing some of that:

Lemieux and Gretzky's offensive domination is out of this world good. To try and capture the offensive domination of each player's best years - I compared the PPG of top performers over each player's best consecutive years. I was initially going to do the same amount of years for each player - but instead i chose to cherry pick the best years possible for each player. 9 for Lemieux, Howe, 10 for Gretzky, 7 for Beliveau and Orr. The idea was to take each player's best years and see how much above others they were in PPG, and not necessarily to pick the exact same amount of years - so as to properly capture the level of offensive domination.

I admit I had trouble selecting which cutoff season for Howe - the other 4 were easier.

I also wasn't initially going to include Beliveau - but when I noticed how close he was to Howe I thought it would make for a good comparison.

Lemieux 1987-88 to 1995-96
Player	Games played	Goals	Assists	Points	PPG
Lemieux	530	468	678	1146	2.16
Gretzky	703	319	866	1185	1.69
Lindros	297	193	243	436	1.47
Yzerman	732	425	607	1032	1.41
Selanne	337	214	237	451	1.34
Lafontaine	571	345	410	755	1.32
Messier	702	310	606	916	1.3

[TBODY] [/TBODY]

Howe 1950-51 to 1958-59
Player	Games played	Goals	Assists	Points	PPG
Howe	618	348	385	733	1.19
Beliveau	377	208	228	436	1.16
Richard	523	275	242	517	0.99
Geoffrion	475	224	230	454	0.96
Bathgate	383	138	216	354	0.92
Moore	411	154	215	369	0.9
Lindsay	601	225	306	531	0.88

[TBODY] [/TBODY]

Gretzky 1980-81 to 1990-91
Player	Games played	Goals	Assists	Points	PPG
Gretzky	846	667	1338	2005	2.37
Lemieux	453	364	519	883	1.95
Bossy	524	400	417	817	1.56
Kurri	754	474	569	1043	1.38
Stastny	826	403	716	1119	1.35
Yzerman	594	342	458	800	1.35
Savard	806	379	693	1072	1.33

[TBODY] [/TBODY]

Orr 1968-69 to 1974-75 - 7 years
Player	Games played	Goals	Assists	Points	PPG
Esposito	539	418	494	912	1.69
Orr	514	235	563	798	1.55
Hull	291	190	173	363	1.25
Dionne	309	139	227	366	1.18
Ratelle	516	241	344	585	1.13
Martin	294	185	143	328	1.12
Mikita	510	212	357	569	1.12

[TBODY] [/TBODY]

Beliveau 1954-55 to 1960-61 - 7 years
Player	Games played	Goals	Assists	Points	PPG
Beliveau	457	255	304	559	1.22
Geoffrion	394	215	244	459	1.16
Howe	472	227	303	530	1.12
Bathgate	485	191	309	500	1.03
Moore	466	190	266	456	0.98
Maurice Richard	321	160	154	314	0.98
Henri Richard	397	140	226	366	0.92

[TBODY] [/TBODY]

Here is how they stack up over the 3rd, 5th and 7th best player:

Player	Domination over 3rd place	Domination over 5th place	Domination over 7th place
Gretzky	52%	76%	78%
Lemieux	47%	61%	66%
Orr	24%	37%	50%
Howe	20%	29%	35%
Beliveau	9%	24%	33%

[TBODY] [/TBODY]

Conclusion - Lemieux and Gretzky dominated their peers offensively by a LOT. Howe is significantly behind - he is closer to Beliveau territory than to Gretzky or Lemieux.
Orr's numbers for a defender - very impressive.​

Not saying Howe isn't great - but his offense is closer to Beliveau territory than it is to Lemieux/Gretzky territory.

 

[Nathaniel Skywalker]

Those % of domination in Art Ross wins aren't representative of his domination level. They are inflated due to:

- Lack of star power (yes I know Richard is great - but it doesn't mean he was necessarily a great point getter, every season)
- Good timing

To a smaller extent it's comparable to how Crosby's 2013-2014 season looks spectacular because of how much he beat the competition - but in an all time sense it's not necessarily that great a season, and seasons in the years prior and after are as good/better than it. This is what happened with Howe 51-54 but for 4 years straight.

If you look at PPG levels for 7 years straight it gives you a better indication of where he stands offensively.

This is an earlier post i made showing some of that:



Not saying Howe isn't great - but his offense is closer to Beliveau territory than it is to Lemieux/Gretzky territory.

I look at this. Great Analysis btw. And I see two forwards of which are heads and shoulders above there peers. And it’s very fitting that both of them are 1st and 2nd to each other in their respective gateways. Then I see Howe very very close to his contempories which reflects well given that he was beaten many times during his prime. I’ve argued this to the moon and back and it’s tiresome.

There is more to the game than offence but when your putting up 0.79 more ppg than your nearest non Gretzky peer in a span of 9 years...

Howes art ross % in his big four years are used to show how dominant he was when out of nowhere he just stops being thst guy and becomes Crosby like... why? Cause real opposition arrived. Like you say going by art ross % a 2014 Crosby is a more dominant player than Lemieux ever was....

 

[Nathaniel Skywalker]

88-93, Lemieux outscores the next closest non-Gretzky competition by 13% (Yzerman), 30% (Robitaille), and 35% (LaFontaine).

Sometimes raw numbers are greater than %

Lemieux 160
Lafontaine 148

At first glance it doesn’t look too bad. Meh a 12 point art ross win. But then when you realize Lemieux played 24 less games you can realize that in no point in the games history was a forward besides Gretzky that dominant. % needs context greatly so

 

[bobholly39]

Not sold. For example, this gives points for getting a "plus" on the power play (i.e. just being on the ice for your team when they score a power play goal) and the same for a shorthanded point (i.e. having a direct influence on your team scoring a goal while a man down). It seems that one achievement is much more rare and impressive than the other, yet they are rewarded the same. That's why this "stat" looks so random to me. I join C1958 on this one in failing to see its value.

Do you see the value of +/- ? Because I don't. It's ridiculously limited and skewed and isn't a good method for evaluating players.

C58 seems to value +/- very, very highly. In fact based on some of his posts - if we let him get away with it he'd be happy to use +/- almost exclusively to rank players. At least that's the impression he's given me.

I'm not saying what I offered is the most relevant of metrics - but it's certainly more relevant than the extremely simplistic view of tying much too much importance to +/- on its own. Here is the discussion string that started me looking into this for what it's worth:

Orr consistently produced results while Gretzky consistently piled on.

????

What results did Orr produce that Gretzky didn't in greater numbers?

Wayne Gretzky +520, Bobby Orr +582 RS

Playoffs Gretzky +66, Orr +60.

Looking past the fact that the +/- is a terribly useful stat (hoping the sarcasm if obvious enough) - you have to also add-on power play points +/- to determine true results, as per your logic. Since a goal on the power play is just as effective to the outcome of a game.

now using only power points (not +/- as on-ice presence during a power play goals - which i think should be attainable but takes more work/research) - you have to add:

890 power play points to Gretzky
324 for Orr

Net result:

Gretzky + 1410
Orr +906

I eventually got to post #778 in the first thread where I converted to using on-ice presence during power play goals, instead of just points, and posted the following 2 tables:

Season	Plus/Minus	PP Goals On Ice for	PK Points	Total
1968-69	55	46	2	103
1969-70	54	79	5	138
1970-71	124	79	13	216
1971-72	83	69	9	161
1972-73	55	57	5	117
1973-74	84	62	4	150
1974-75	80	81	4	165
Total				1050

[TBODY] [/TBODY]

Season	Plus/Minus	PP Goals On Ice for	PK Points	Total
1980-81	41	67	7	115
1981-82	80	75	8	163
1982-83	61	77	10	148
1983-84	78	70	23	171
1984-85	100	61	18	179
1985-86	71	69	18	158
1986-87	69	64	13	146
Total				1080

[TBODY] [/TBODY]

I added a similar table for Lemieux a few posts down (couldn't find data for Howe).

Conclusion. +/- overall is terribly limited. But my method makes a lot more logical sense to me to try and better capture the "results" a player produced during his career - than simply looking up their career +/- on hockey-reference and drawing conclusions from it. Which a certain posted tried to do.

 

[VanIslander]

Gretzky... says Esposito "... knows when his defenseman's going to be beat before his defenseman knows it."

Haha! Nicely put Phil. Now THAT is believeable.

Gretzky's awareness of what's happening and going to happen is incredible. Hockey sense, hockey iq, hockey wizardry.

 

[VanIslander]

Howe was a complete player and he remained healthy despite playing a physical game in a tough era.

Howe was often injured, at times majorly (check out his long list of career injuries), but he remained tough despite being injured a lot in a rough era. He wasn't lucky, he had renowned fortitude and an iron will.

 

[ChiTownPhilly]

The metaphor I'm thinking of is- we're refining our telescope just in time for us to be training our lens away from possibly the most interesting portion of the sky. That said, maybe we can collate our tools and apply them to future rounds- since viewpoints seem to be pretty case-hardened for this round.

And now (because voting has closed), I'd like to indulge a mini-rant about the whole "doesn't-come-to-play-every-night" brickbat that we've heard before- and will probably hear again before this project comes to a close.

I have my opinions about the size of the modern league, the length of the regular season, the irrelevancy of playoff seeds, the manner in which standings-points are counted- and certain background ephemera. If I were to give full voice to my feelings I'd really put the profanity-filter through its paces. So- to keep it clean (at least on this occasion) I'll boil it down to two points-

1) I don't think effort-cost management should be treated as an obscene concept.

2) I really don't give a fig if a player for a non-playoff-bubble team mails it in during the mid-February trip to Sunrise, FL.

 

[ted2019]

There are 3 players in the games history of 100 years that stood head and shoulders above their peers. It just so happens that one of those players prime colluded with another’s prime. It was the end I will concede. Nevertheless Gretzky was still taking care of business. This player had no peers and he is shown lack of respect, who the hell actually thinks Lemieux was not better than friggin Gordie Howe. I’m sorry but get real

I have Howe 1st, Gordie was a complete player and played at a relatively high level as a 51 year old in the NHL We all know about Mario's health and his incredible comeback from a disease that Myself & Mario both shared, so that places a soft spot in my heart for him. Saying all of that, he couldn't stay healthy, played incredibly soft for a player at his size, and more matter how incredible he was offensively, that can't overcome his other shortcomings in my view.

 

[ted2019]

Me

Howe was a complete player and he remained healthy despite playing a physical game in a tough era.

Lemieux was great and insanely talented but he had his warts.I know you love him, but you're the one disrespecting Howe.I don't see much disrespect for Lemieux here.We all saw him play, we know what he was.

He's a Penguin fan.

 

[ted2019]

I look at this. Great Analysis btw. And I see two forwards of which are heads and shoulders above there peers. And it’s very fitting that both of them are 1st and 2nd to each other in their respective gateways. Then I see Howe very very close to his contempories which reflects well given that he was beaten many times during his prime. I’ve argued this to the moon and back and it’s tiresome.

There is more to the game than offence but when your putting up 0.79 more ppg than your nearest non Gretzky peer in a span of 9 years...

Howes art ross % in his big four years are used to show how dominant he was when out of nowhere he just stops being thst guy and becomes Crosby like... why? Cause real opposition arrived. Like you say going by art ross % a 2014 Crosby is a more dominant player than Lemieux ever was....

You really need to take your homer glasses off and to be objective. If you can't, then maybe you need to stick to the Penguins board and bow to the shine of Mario/Sid over there. Here people have their favorites, but most here don't let it cloud their objectively in this process.

 

[VanIslander]

... I really don't give a fig if a player for a non-playoff-bubble team mails it in during the mid-February trip to Sunrise, FL.

Tkachuk, Bure, Roenick, Yashin, ... these guys aren't even in this project, due less to lack of talent than to character issues concerning effort, work ethic and commitment.

Who are you talking about?

There are several EXCEPTIONALLY hard-working consistent performers who deserve extra credit.

But I can't think of a top 100 slacker. Gump Worsley's refusal to practice? He's a marginal candidate.

*shrug*

 

[ted2019]

Howe was often injured, at times majorly (check out his long list of career injuries), but he remained tough despite being injured a lot in a rough era. He wasn't lucky, he had renowned fortitude and an iron will.

Howe was often injured, but he played through most of his injuries and continued to play at a high level.

 

[bobholly39]

Howe was often injured, but he played through most of his injuries and continued to play at a high level.

I don't really like that line of discussion too much because of how limited our knowledge is of various injuries (and even moreso in past eras than today).

I mean at the end of every playoff up to 2017-2018 you hear accounts of players playing through injuries - broken fingers/hands or worst. But then there are some injuries which are completely debilitating that you can't play through.

If someone were to (and not saying you're saying that) argue Howe > Lemieux because Howe was able to play through injuries more than Lemieux - i'd say that statement doesn't hold water without knowing what their injuries are and getting a sense of who actually played through worst injuries. It's not for certain Howe comes out ahead.

Although Lemieux's career is absolutely filled with missed games, weeks, months - whose to say that he isn't the toughest of the 2 based on the type of health issues/degree of injuries he was able to play through?

 

[ImporterExporter]

Interested to see how this turns out later today.

 

[ChiTownPhilly]

Who are you talking about?

Oh, I was just referring to stuff like this:

... with Lemieux there's always a give and take. The dude took games off.

And that's really kind of unfair of me to out-of-context quote like that, because TMM has been an asset to our conversations. TMM's a star, and is just one 'D' away from becoming a legend.

Now, if your team narrowly misses the playoffs and you visibly took games off, well then yeah- shame. If you take games off in the playoffs, then über-shame. The Grotesquely Overrated Center has stat-lines and box-scores that read like he took games off in the playoffs... but in fairness, I don't think it was that- I think it was just serial gaggage. Which, for the purpose of his benefit to the team, leads (led?) to más o menos the same result.

 

[VanIslander]

Lemieux is done.
Votes are in.

We're on to 5th+ best.

So you have nothing to worry about!

 

[BraveCanadian]

It just doesn't make sense. If you want to go back to what I wrote last night, and really take a look at it, and explain how Orr could have been a 35-40 minute player and have him and everyone else still end up at the same GF/GA figures, be my guest. I don't see any way to get there without making Orr a low-event player - and he wasn't.

Right? He wasn't a low event player. Right? We at least agree on that, don't we?

We simply don't know.

When someone put in the time to manually check a couple of games he was at 34 minutes.

I am sure the estimates all make sense with the limited and somewhat unrelated data points we have to figure out ice time, but apart from that being an issue in itself, we both know that those original calculations had a factor entered to make player ice time jive with what made sense based on late 90s usage.

For several reasons it is possible that they are not that precisely accurate for players of other eras, which is what gets people's back up with how you seem to treat them as gospel. How confident are you on a difference between 31 minutes and 34? Woud you think the margin for error on these is less than say, 10%, for an outlier player like Orr?

 

[MXD]

+/- isn't always useful, but here, we're talking about players who were "go to" players, players that a coach wanted on the ice as much as possible. We aren't discussing, I dunno, Alex Killhorn and Lars Eller. So yeah, at OUR stage, it's absolutely useful.

 

[ChiTownPhilly]

Interested to see how this turns out later today.

As far as the identity and ranking of the top-4, it'll have all the suspense of a General Election for the Mayor of Chicago.

Now, the actual interesting part will be the new nominees for Round 2.

 

[MXD]

As far as the identity and ranking of the top-4, it'll have all the suspense of a General Election for the Mayor of Chicago.

Now, the actual interesting part will be the new nominees for Round 2.

...And there's actually only 4 of them.

 

[BraveCanadian]

In that case, maybe you should consider Maurice Richard's take on Gretzky. From SI:

Along the way this nearly anemic wunderkind-next-door shattered Rocket Richard's mark of 50 goals in 50 games, probably the most hallowed record in hockey. It had stood since 1945 and had been equaled only once, by Bossy in 1980-81. Gretzky, who sets up many more goals than he scores, many more than Richard or Bossy ever set up, got his 50th goal last season in his 39th game. Afterward, Richard, who seldom praises modern players, said, "I have now seen Gretzky enough to say that in whatever decade he played, he would've been the scoring champion."

Source:

GREATNESS CONFIRMED

I don't think I had read that article before. It is often interesting to read some of the reactions from people at the time some of these events were happening. Gretzky is sure painted in a better light here than he often is on the main board, where he was apparently always a slow weakling who wouldn't even make the NHL today.

 

[MXD]

As a sidenote : I'd estimate that 75% of the posts of this round were related, directly or indirectly, to Mario Lemieux. I think it was, to a certain extent, justified : 4 players are making it, and Lemieux was amongst these 4 players... presumptively 4th. I get that.

But for the next rounds, it would probably be more interesting if 75% of the posts wouldn't focus on a player that a signficant part of us witnessed.

 

[BM67]

The NHL now has +/- from 1959-60 on. That gives us the last 12 years of Beliveau and Howe. Beliveau was +117 on a team that was +516. Howe was +151 on a team that was -50. Gretzky over his last 12 seasons was +6 on teams that were +45.

Howe was on for about 42% of Detroit's +GF, and 34% of their -GA. Beliveau was on for about 29.5% of Montreal's +GF, and 32% of their -GA. Gretzky was on for about 45% +GF, and 46% -GA for his teams.

Beliveau was a - on great/very good teams, so the bar was higher for him. Howe was a + on a few good teams, but mostly mediocre/bad teams.

 

[Sentinel]

I had Howe #2. His raw numbers don't look great for single season point totals, but he was well above his peers. It is possible he was born at the perfect time to be head and shoulders above shorter peers.

More like "head and elbows above his peers."