The Ignorance of History In Mainstream

pappyline

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Jul 3, 2005
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... and I haven't even started to scratch the surface.

I'd rather watch players ditacte the outcome of hockey game rather than politicians and refs.

Had players like Lemieux, Gretzky, Orr, Howe been given the same advantages players are given now and their scoring records accomplishments might have been magnified.

The game as a whole is faster now but is it really? It's faster because players just rush up and down the ice looking like zombies, they look like they are skating fast but in reality they are just simply playing a system. Dump the puck, chase it and make sure you at least pick up a point during the game.

In my mind I think the best hockey ever played was between 1985 and 1995.

Players were starting to get bigger and stronger, the goalies started to play the butterfly and were becoming more athletic and true game breakers but at least they had "soul", at least they played for the love of the game.

I think the first lockout hurt the league back in 1994-95 but even after that lockout things seemed fine, but the NHL decided that scoring was too high, so what did they do? They made all these changes that took away from the game.

What happened then is that they realized by the late 90's early 2000's that scoring had gone down way too much so then instead of trying to actually get to the problem, instead they completely changed the game.

Goalies don't fight anymore, star players don't fight their own battles, penalties are called like it is a joke now.

Players might be improving physically and the evolution of modern athletes is something to behold, but the result of this has actually made the sport regress.

The sad part is I don't see an improvement anytime soon.

Old time hockey is long gone and so is the fun of the sport.

I think the state of professional sports and hockey in particular is a very complex thing that involves athletics, economics, greed.

Players are content making the big bucks and being thrust into the spotlight but the sad part is now the NHL is being run like Boxing, players are the victims (they are brainwashed into thinking they are the *****) and the GM, owners and Bettman are the manipulators.
LOL. I find it amusing to see someone from the 80's posting on the HOH forum referring to 85-95 as the good old days.
 

Sens Rule

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Sep 22, 2005
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I can understand that regarding some American markets. However, in Canada hockey is very important. You would think the average Canadian would have a grasp on the history of the game. Additionally, you would think that these journalists would also have a understanding and respect for the history of hockey. Stating that Sidney Crosby is the best Penguin is just plain ignorant. There many other examples as well that come from Canadian media.

In Ottawa almost all of our sports writers do not even know the Cap Hits of our current players. They basically write 90% of their articles on the Senators, they need to know or be able to access the salaries of 20-25 players. That is such a simple thing. Yet they write articles every week with incorrect information. How can we expect them to know anything about history when they can't even get the present right?

It is worse in the broader spectrum of society than in hockey. Because hockey is not very important. History is. There is no context in political coverage. It seems the media in general and the audience has no broader base of information to put information into. It is reaction, after reaction with no historical context. School shooting then we need to crack down on guns or video games or something. Food recall where no one is even sick and it is precautionary and there is a huge overreaction. No matter what it is it is all about right now and totally irrelevant things get covered as if they have significance.
 

Sens Rule

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Sep 22, 2005
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That's a rather defeatist attitude. No offense to you personally. For a couple of years now, I've been studying, researching, and contributing to the world of Sabremetrics in baseball. It's been met with it's share of criticisms but the BBWAA have slowly begun to accept it and you are starting to see players win awards that wouldn't have 10, hell even 5 years ago.

You can't take the defeatist approach. If you are serious about having history taken seriously then you have to keep pounding on the door.


To this day, try and convince the mainstream that Carlton didn't deserve the Cy Young in 1982.

Some of the ignorance from posters and hockey fans regarding history is trying to explain what happened by looking at stats. Hockey is NOT BASEBALL. Baseball is a sport where statistics are indeed a relevant measure and Sabremetrics is a very valid science. In hockey while some type of Sabremetrics could make statistics more relevant in telling the story of what actual happened in perspective, they really will never be able to tell all that much.

Hockey is not a sport like baseball where there is a specific outcome to each individual event. There is a pitch and it is either hit somewhere or it is in the catchers glove. And then another event happens, another pitch. Hockey is not at all similar. Every moment has thousands of possible outcomes not a few dozen. And each moment influences the next moment. You can look at a stat sheet and see that a team got 20 hits in a game but you can't tell if one of those hits was by Cam Neely and it completely turned around a game or a playoff series. You can't measure Doug Gilmour's determination on any stat sheet.

When some people look at stats that is all they see. Yet the stats do not tell even close to the entire story. In baseball to a large degree they do. Just an aside to this thread but I see it a lot here, people trying to measure things that should not be measured with stats. People trying to adjust goals for years and somehow predict what player X would do in Year Y. It just is not a relevant measure.

Also someone mentioned video games in an earlier post. Comparing Super Nintendo games to current games. I think that is some of the problems with younger people posting here. They think people are computers. And somehow with better training and diet a player will double in power ever 18 months like an Intel processor! They talk like Bourque or Gretzky or Mario were from some distant past, a different era. Now people have super powers or something?!? If only Gretzky had today's training? What a stupid point. He had superior training to todays players before he was 10 years old training with his dad in his back yard.

People are the same now as they were 10 years ago or a freaking hundred years ago. In one or two or three generations somehow all of the players now are these vastly superior athletes. Humans have not evolved much in thousands of years. We eat a better diet but so did our parents and grand parents and great grand parents in North America.
 

Mayor Bee

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Dec 29, 2008
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No, Sedin is dynamite. But I will say this, seeing the Sedins in the mid-80s would have been incredible, even moreso than today. Their give-and-go style would have been perfect for that era. Sedin is a better Craig Janney, but Janney is the 80s-90s player who he reminds me most of.

I'd say Adam Oates before I'd bring up Craig Janney, but to each his own.

The point Jagr was making - and I agree with him 100% - is that the players and the game today is too robotic and systematic compared to the exciting years between 85-95.

This is more about the way the game is being played (and run) today than it is certain players. For example, there was a Sidney Crosby in the 80s - his name was Steve Yzerman. For those who remember the young Steve Yzerman, he was very similar to Crosby, but he was more exciting to watch because the game as a whole was more exciting.

Of course, this is a complete rehash of everything that was said 10 years ago about "the modern game", 20 years ago about "the modern game", 30 years ago about "the modern game", and so on. The funny thing is that no less of an authority than Foster Hewitt would tell anyone who would listen in the early 1980s how pathetic he believed the game was because there was no structure and no defense, just constant attack and counterattack.
 

Mayor Bee

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Dec 29, 2008
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It is worse in the broader spectrum of society than in hockey. Because hockey is not very important. History is. There is no context in political coverage. It seems the media in general and the audience has no broader base of information to put information into. It is reaction, after reaction with no historical context. School shooting then we need to crack down on guns or video games or something. Food recall where no one is even sick and it is precautionary and there is a huge overreaction. No matter what it is it is all about right now and totally irrelevant things get covered as if they have significance.

Not to delve into the political angle too much, but we hear constantly that "politics is much more uncivilized than every before". Anyone who's ever looked at a presidential election before Warren Harding knows that is not only untrue, but an absolutely laughable opinion. I believe that modern society has limits on libelous or slanderous discourse, but before about 1920, actual official campaign literature stopped at nothing to smear the other side and other candidate.
 

MXD

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Oct 27, 2005
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Quarterbacks and running backs are remembered just fine, though mostly on reputation (Joe Namath, enemy of stat guys everywhere) and even then they might be forgotten if they're too old. Jim Thorpe, namesake of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, was also omitted from Top 100. The only member of the undefeated 72 Dolphins to make the list spent most of his career with Cleveland. Sid Luckman was quarterback of 4 NFL championship teams, and his 28 TD passes in 10 games in 1943 remained a Chicago Bears record until 1995 when Erik Kramer threw 29 in 16 games, and despite more games and rules designed to encourage passing, Kramer's still the only Bear to beat Luckman. Guess who didn't make the Top 100?

All baseball has is history. But mostly it's Yankees history, with a splish-splash of Boston or Chicago tossed in. Which is not good for guys like Stan Musial.

Well, I could conceive Luckman being out of a Top-100. That would feel like Cy Dennenny out of our Top-100, but that's conceivable. As long as Erik Kramer isn't in that Top-100...

As for baseball, it does have its Yankees bias (Mattingly vs. Olerud BHOF voting is a farce), but I don't think it's that bad. I mean... I think it's pretty much canon that the best pitcher of all-time is a Senator (even if it says NATIONALS on the French wiki page :rant:), Ty Cobb seems widely recognized as the 2nd best position player to play the game, etc...

The NHL is in the unenviable position of trying to promote the modern game while also attempting to educate on the history.

In one sense, it's a lot like what MLB was forced to do in the early 1990s. They were facing the first generation of sports fans who had grown up with NFL Films and had propelled the NFL to the position of "most popular league". So when Fox picked up the MLB contract for Saturday games, their announcers spent an inordinate amount of time talking about the history of baseball. Finally, the network implemented a system: if a broadcaster mentioned a player who was dead or had been retired for more than 40 years, he was fined $100 per offense.

This is where the NHL Network needs to really step up. Get a panel together, select a top 100 or top 150 of all-time, and have an hour-long biographical program on every single one of them. It'd be a lot better than watching "NHL On The Fly" for 15 straight hours.

Good idea to "educate" people gone wrong -- this said, before bringing up a name like Tris Speaker, I think it's crucial that the viewers know about Willie Mays...

Books about hockey are rare, few and far between, but they're usually pretty decent. But a great hockey historian could bring it all together. Also, imagine if someone of Ken Burns' caliber did a documentary on hockey and put it on PBS? That'd gin up some support, too.

Ken Dryden did that roughly 20 years ago.
 

Retsmra2010*

Guest
Some of the ignorance from posters and hockey fans regarding history is trying to explain what happened by looking at stats. Hockey is NOT BASEBALL. Baseball is a sport where statistics are indeed a relevant measure and Sabremetrics is a very valid science. In hockey while some type of Sabremetrics could make statistics more relevant in telling the story of what actual happened in perspective, they really will never be able to tell all that much.

First, Sabermetrics is not a perfect science which is why we use anecdotal evidence as much as the next sport to help make decisions.
Hockey is not a sport like baseball where there is a specific outcome to each individual event. There is a pitch and it is either hit somewhere or it is in the catchers glove. And then another event happens, another pitch. Hockey is not at all similar. Every moment has thousands of possible outcomes not a few dozen. And each moment influences the next moment. You can look at a stat sheet and see that a team got 20 hits in a game but you can't tell if one of those hits was by Cam Neely and it completely turned around a game or a playoff series. You can't measure Doug Gilmour's determination on any stat sheet.
Glad to see the hockey isn't the only sport where ignorance is shown. LMAO. Baseball players and the sport are robotic but hockey is just so gosh darn hard to measure..........
 

Leafs Forever

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Jul 14, 2009
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Could it not possibly have been a joke? I mean, Apps being dead and all...

If it is, it was a rather insensitive one. Yes Roenik, you make your fame and your money by your mouth- but have some respect for the old and the dead.

--------------------------------------------------

It saddens me to see some of the ignorance on behalf of journalists and other figures. As stated, a lot of it is marketing and greed- and I think that affects our journalists too- most people don't care about older guys, so they can't write about older guys or they won't sell. THN's top-100 lists were pretty critisized for gipping some older guys and overrating some modern guys, but to their credit they did try to appreciate the older guys more than most media outlets do.
 

Hardyvan123

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Jul 4, 2010
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Yeah you can't cure ignorance. It isn't just hockey either. I have a friend who is a HUGE Pittsburgh Steelers fan. He claims Ben Roethlisberger is the best Steelers QB of all time. I looked at him like he had three heads. Ummmm..........Terry Bradshaw? His repsonse:

"Oh, well, it was easier to win in the 1970s."

"What evidence do you have that Big Ben is better than Bradshaw? Bradshaw won 4 Super Bowls, 2 Super Bowl MVPs, one league MVP. Big Ben has two Super Bowls and never won even a Super Bowl MVP."

"Well, Bradshaw didn't have Brady or Manning to compete against for the MVP either."

"No, he only had Roger Staubach, Frank Tarkenton, Walter Payton, OJ Simpson, Dan Fouts and guys like that. You are right, the NFL was filled with passengers at that time."

"Well, teams can't win multiple championships like the Steelers did anymore. It just doesn't happen."

"Hmmmmm..........New England Patriots? A dynasty in the last 10 years. L.A. Lakers three peating and now the current two-time reigning champs........"

True conversation.



You see, it's easier to be ignorant than actually STUDY the history of a sport. I always bring this up too. In 30 years if some punk comes up to you and discredits what Tom Brady and Peyton Manning did or what Sidney Crosby did will you defend them or actually agree with them? Hopefully the former rather than the latter. So why would it be any different from 30 years ago today?

Well the Steelers had some Zebra help on their win over the Seahawks and basketball is the one sport where one guy like Kobe can have the biggest impact on championships more than in any other team sport IMO.

Just for the record I would take Big Ben over Bradshaw 8 days a week and so would most Steeler fans.
 

Tinalera

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Feb 3, 2007
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Well, I could conceive Luckman being out of a Top-100. That would feel like Cy Dennenny out of our Top-100, but that's conceivable. As long as Erik Kramer isn't in that Top-100...

As for baseball, it does have its Yankees bias (Mattingly vs. Olerud BHOF voting is a farce), but I don't think it's that bad. I mean... I think it's pretty much canon that the best pitcher of all-time is a Senator (even if it says NATIONALS on the French wiki page :rant:), Ty Cobb seems widely recognized as the 2nd best position player to play the game, etc...



Good idea to "educate" people gone wrong -- this said, before bringing up a name like Tris Speaker, I think it's crucial that the viewers know about Willie Mays...



Ken Dryden did that roughly 20 years ago.

"The Game"? One of the best books I've ever read-hockey or otherwise. The Mini-series was well done too.
 

Big Phil

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Nov 2, 2003
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Well the Steelers had some Zebra help on their win over the Seahawks and basketball is the one sport where one guy like Kobe can have the biggest impact on championships more than in any other team sport IMO.

Just for the record I would take Big Ben over Bradshaw 8 days a week and so would most Steeler fans.

Well that settles it, you weren't alive to watch the Steelers dynasty with Bradshaw. I'm sorry but in yesterday's game Big Ben went 10-for-20 for 133 yards and two interceptions. He was not the reason the Steelers won the AFC championshiup yesterday. He often isn't the reason. Big Ben is the NFL's version of Chris Osgood. In other words, a player who is more notably the product of his team than the other way around. Nobody who was alive to watch Bradshaw (or who wasn't alive but has studied the history of the NFL) would ever consider Big Ben the better QB.
 

Boxscore

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So did Bettman postpone the All-Star Game yet because Crosby is bailing? :)
 

JT Dutch*

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Well that settles it, you weren't alive to watch the Steelers dynasty with Bradshaw. I'm sorry but in yesterday's game Big Ben went 10-for-20 for 133 yards and two interceptions. He was not the reason the Steelers won the AFC championshiup yesterday. He often isn't the reason. Big Ben is the NFL's version of Chris Osgood. In other words, a player who is more notably the product of his team than the other way around. Nobody who was alive to watch Bradshaw (or who wasn't alive but has studied the history of the NFL) would ever consider Big Ben the better QB.

... I dunno, Bradshaw was the QB on a Steeler team that: had the best defense in the NFL, the Steel Curtain; one of the best running attacks in the game (Harris and Bleier), and terrific wideouts (Swann and Stallworth).

Bradshaw had exactly two more TD passes (212) than interceptions (210) in his career. Roethlisberger has 144 TDs and just 86 interceptions. That's a huge difference.

Bradshaw threw for about a yard more per pass attempt than did Ben. Bradshaw was more mobile, for sure. Roethisberger's record as a QB is 60-26, Bradshaw's was 107-51. It's very, very close.
 

Hardyvan123

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Jul 4, 2010
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Well that settles it, you weren't alive to watch the Steelers dynasty with Bradshaw. I'm sorry but in yesterday's game Big Ben went 10-for-20 for 133 yards and two interceptions. He was not the reason the Steelers won the AFC championshiup yesterday. He often isn't the reason. Big Ben is the NFL's version of Chris Osgood. In other words, a player who is more notably the product of his team than the other way around. Nobody who was alive to watch Bradshaw (or who wasn't alive but has studied the history of the NFL) would ever consider Big Ben the better QB.

Nobody?

Look both guys are underrated and under appreciated IMO as they both played on teams that were known first for their defense and then their running games.

I just think that Ben's teams rely on him more than Bradshaw's teams ever did but maybe that says more to the teams they played on than the actual 2 players we are talking about here.

Football QB's are even more difficult to judge than NHL stars, and are more comparable to goalies maybe, as the game is more complex and has even more factors going into a players (teams) success than in hockey.
 

monster_bertuzzi

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I remember Nick Kypreos *****ing about Syl Apps being ranked higher than Sundin on an all-time Leaf list or something.

You learn to appreciate history because guess what - 50 years from now kids will be saying '''pfff Crosby and Ovechkin? They would suck in todays NHL'' and we'll be the old timers defending them lol.
 

JFA87-66-99

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Jun 12, 2007
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Roenick thinks he's one of the top 20 centers of all-time. He's very foolish to think that. How many stanley cups & awards did he win? Is he a hall of famer? Absolutely not. Roenick was a good player buts thats it. he has no business even being in the conversation for best 20 centers. I think Syl Apps would have crushed roenick. lets have a little more respect for the all-time greats.
 

livewell68

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Jul 20, 2007
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Roenick thinks he's one of the top 20 centers of all-time. He's very foolish to think that. How many stanley cups & awards did he win? Is he a hall of famer? Absolutely not. Roenick was a good player buts thats it. he has no business even being in the conversation for best 20 centers. I think Syl Apps would have crushed roenick. lets have a little more respect for the all-time greats.

Roenick will probably make the Hall when it is all said and done, after a few years and a few ballots but he's not a top 20 center.

He might be a top 100 player all-time but that's about it.
 

seventieslord

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Roenick will probably make the Hall when it is all said and done, after a few years and a few ballots but he's not a top 20 center.

He might be a top 100 player all-time but that's about it.

Roenick's not even a top-200 player.

Hockey history is 100+ years long, and a top-200 list should feature roughly 90 defensemen and goalies in total, so about 110 forwards. Each era should be fairly represented and there should only be room for about a dozen forwards from Roenick's era. With Oates, Sakic, Jagr, Gilmour, Yzerman, Francis, Lemieux, Fedorov, Bure, and Selanne clearly better than him, and likely a handful more that I just haven't mentioned, he's pretty in tough to make a serious top-200 list.
 

livewell68

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Jul 20, 2007
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Roenick's not even a top-200 player.

Hockey history is 100+ years long, and a top-200 list should feature roughly 90 defensemen and goalies in total, so about 110 forwards. Each era should be fairly represented and there should only be room for about a dozen forwards from Roenick's era. With Oates, Sakic, Jagr, Gilmour, Yzerman, Francis, Lemieux, Fedorov, Bure, and Selanne clearly better than him, and likely a handful more that I just haven't mentioned, he's pretty in tough to make a serious top-200 list.

I guess you're right.

As for the actual ignorance of history in mainstream, it is very present but I have to add another element to this discussion.

There is also for the "purists and hockey of old fanatics" this sense of things like this:

If Gretzky was in his prime and had the same rules of today that he would score 200 Pts every year or that Lemieux could do the same thing".


The game has changed in many ways that goes far beyond rule changes, it is a an overall change of strategic play, the play and positioning of goaltenders, the robotic manner players play. Many things have changed.

Gretzky would still have the talent but because of these changes, Gretzky could score 150 maybe 160 Pts, not more than that.
 

Mad Habber

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Jul 5, 2006
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Part of the reason with the NHL forgetting its own history is they are trying to sell their product in non-traditional markets. Markets without history. What do fans in Phoenix, Atlanta, Tampa, Raleigh, Anaheim care about Syl Apps. They have no connection to Syl Apps. What do those fans care about the glorious history of the Montreal Canadiens. What do the Habs have to do with the Thrashers. Why would they care that Bobby Orr dominated games and league scoring even as a defenseman 40 years ago Heck most of those people probably don’t know who Eric Vail and Tom Lysiak were. Shame on the league for not trying to educate their fans but their only concern seems to be the here and now. 10 years from now, they will have forgotten about Iginla, Lidstrom, Reechi, Chelios. Chelios is already forgotten. How many remember how good he was in Montreal and Chicago. Most of the NHL’s marketing target audience think Chelios was always 40 something years old playing for Detroit.

Oh well. Roenick is just a fool for making that idiotic comment, and a delusional fool if he actually believes it.
 

Dangler99*

Guest
A big FAIL to Adams for not defending the integrity of the game's history. Krystal's arguments had more holes than Steve Buzinski and I would have had a field day taking apart his DeLorean logic.

As for Roenick, Apps can't hear Jeremy 'cuz he was buried with his Stanley Cup rings in his ears.
 

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