seventieslord
Student Of The Game
No need to make an exception for Nighbor... his offensive record was better even if you just go with raw points.
Top-100 Hockey Players of All-Time - Round 2, Vote 12
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No need to make an exception for Nighbor... his offensive record was better even if you just go with raw points.
overpass
Registered User
- Jun 7, 2007
- 5,269
- 2,784
I posted some Macleans pieces on Sprague Cleghorn earlier. Here are a few more articles from the Macleans archives about available players. Most of the content is more colour than analysis, but still good reads. Links and excerpts are below. Unfortunately not all players in this round were featured in Macleans' pages.
Bernard Geoffrion
THE HIGHEST SCORING BARITONE IN HISTORY | Maclean's | SEPTEMBER 22 1962
Many hockey people, including Canadiens’ coach Toe Blake, believe that Geoffrion’s immensely powerful shot was the principle cause for an NHL rules change a few years ago. When Geoffrion first came into the NHL. in 1950. a team that had a minor penalty had to play five men against six for a full two minutes. “When we had our power play with Gcoffrion on the point (a position near the blue line usually played by a forward like Geoffrion when a team has an advantage), we were getting so many goals that they had to do something to make the game more even.” Blake says. Now, as soon as the unpenalized team scores a goal, the penalized player is allowed to return to the ice.
Frank Mahovlich
VIVA MAHOVLICH! | Maclean's | February 25 1961
First, you'd have to say his style, the way he skates. There are other excellent skaters in the NHL—Henri Richard, certainly, and Bobby Hull. Mahovlich himself says that Carl Brewer, a defenseman with the Leafs, is faster. But no one else is so elegant, so electric, so furious, so fluid. The skater across the page, even though his number is hidden under a practice uniform, could be no one but Mahovlich, as anyone who has seen him, even on television, will tell you. Other skaters stride, he swoops. They glide, he soars. They sprint, he explodes. Head dowm. shoulder up, legs churning, one hand on his stick. Mahovlich looks like the Super Continental coming through Saskatchewan, and he is almost as powerful and as hard to knock down.
And there are the goals. There is. after all, nothing quite like a goal. Mahovlich can spot an opportunity to score the way Billy the Kid could spot a slow draw. Then he circles like an eagle, pounces like a panther, strikes with the accuracy of a king cobra. In one game in Boston this winter, he took five shots and scored four goals. He has been scoring one of every four the Leafs get.
And. like all other real champions. Mahovlich is lucky. Of his first forty goals this season, there were at least four that, because of empty nets or perfect passes or defensive lapses. Mazo de la Roche could have scored.
But the most distinctive quality about Mahovlich is his laziness. He is like the little girl who had the little curl: when he is good he is very, very good and when he is bad he stinks up the place. He is so lazy that his laziness takes on a sort of heroism. No one but a great star could be that lazy. He calls it “positional hockey.” but it looks from the stands as if. while his teammates are battling heroically to get the puck out of their own end, Mahovlich is preparing to take a nap at centre ice. This drives the customers berserk. The result is that when Mahovlich is on the ice he is cither being roundly cheered or lustily booed (one lady in the east blues boos him all the time, on principle) but he is always being watched.
If Pete’n’Frank could only be a little more like Jean’n’Guy | Maclean's | FEBRUARY 9, 1976
Admittedly Frank does march to a different drum—even after the band stops playing. Peter? Well, his incisive analytical mind would prod him to cut a hole in the drum to see what made the boom. Frank is as a black-thatched swan. He could always skate circles around his peers in the NHL The problem was that they became ever-increasing circles. On nights these circles took him in the same direction as the puck, he scored big. On other nights . . . well at least his tracings in compulsory figures were more accurate than Karen Magnussen’s. He scored 533 goals in the NHL without working up a sweat. But if he’d only sweated and scored a mere 100, he’d have been as popular in Montreal as, well, Jimmy Roberts.
Marcel Dionne
KING OF THE KINGS | Maclean's | MARCH 24, 1980
Los Angeles, however, offered both the best money and the farthest escape. “It was the easiest way to go,” Dionne says. With the accusations trailing him—“He can rip a team apart,” Johnny Wilson, one former coach offered—he came to a team that had just had its best season, standing fourth over-all, and was offering defensive, disciplined hockey under coach Bobby Pulford. He was suspect from the beginning. Pulford hadn’t even been told about Cooke’s deal and was so distraught at first sight of his stocky little star that he assigned him immediately to the team’s “Fàt Squad,” forced him to skate extra laps at practice with plastic sheets wrapped around his swollen stomach. But this time Dionne did not walk out on practice, as he had done in Detroit. And instead of sulking, as he might once have done, he worked and listened. “Pully thought I was a zipperhead,” Dionne now says. “If he could’ve made me crawl, he would have. I wouldn’t crawl. I respect him for what he did because after a while he knew I was not what he had heard.”
Pulford discovered, as so many others have, that the tallest part of Dionne is his pride. “I don’t want to kiss anyone’s ass,” he had decided just before turning professional and, though he has certainly suffered for his refreshing frankness, hockey’s own belated maturing over recent years has meant that Detroit’s “big baby” is now seen as Los Angeles’ leader and highly articulate spokesman—without Dionne himself having changed much. He once said, “There seems to be a tiny part of me I can’t control.” But his railing against archaic management and gang-warfare hockey has in truth been extremely calculated. “If I had to do it again,” he says, “I’d do it. And I’d tell you why— because I know I can play for any team in this league.” Before Dionne, the outspoken hockey player was a rarity—Ted Lindsay in the ’50s, Bobby Hull to a lesser extent later—but today, with Darryl Sittler fighting management in Toronto and Guy Lafleur attacking lazy, wealthy hockey players in Montreal, the cures for the ill health of hockey are coming, as it should, from the game’s healthier cells. “I had to say to hell with it,” says Dionne. “If that’s what hockey’s all about, I’ll say it. It depends on how much guts you have and how much you believe in yourself.”
Charlie Conacher
https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1957/3/2/me-and-my-family-the-story-of-the-conachers
When I started playing hockey as a kid 1 was terrible. We lived three doors away from Jesse Ketchum school where there were two hockey rinks and a pleasure rink. I was so bad as a skater that they made me the goalkeeper to get me out of the way. But when Lionel, who was nine years older, started to make a go of it in hockey and started bringing in a few dollars I knew I had to succeed.
I just about lived on that rink. I practiced shooting the puck against the boards for hours, and I mean for hours. I skated until I thought my legs would drop off. Even when 1 made the Leafs I kept at it. They didn’t play on Sundays in the NHL then so I used to go down to the old Mutual Street Arena, which pre-dated Maple Leaf Gardens, and practice with Lome Chabot, our goaltender. Poor Chabot, how I used to black-and-blue him! I'd spend an hour, just shooting for spots. Then another hour skating in on him. not shooting, but trying to outguess him, to fake him out of position before tucking the puck in the net. He'd tell me where my fakes weren't fooling him, and I taught him how to cover the angles. We’d have side bets for a drink or a sandwich or whatever; I’d bet him I could outguess him six times out of ten, and it got so that I could always do it, too. Sportswriters have often written that I had the hardest shot in hockey, and Turk Broda and Roy Worters, who had something like thirty years of NHL goalkeeping between them, claim this is so, too. If it’s true 1 just want to say that I acquired it the hard way.
https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1957/3/16/big-moments-i-remember
https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1957/3/30/lionel-could-do-anything
https://archive.macleans.ca/article...hers-part-iv-why-the-kid-line-became-a-legend
You still hear the centreman called a playmaker sometimes these days but usually he isn’t. Under the rules and the pattern of offense of the Thirties he had to be— he’d take the puck up the middle and then try to draw the defense together to stop him so that he could then make a play to one of his wingmen cutting in from the side. With defensemen like Ching Johnson and Taffy Abel of the Rangers, and Eddie Shore and Lionel Hitchman of the Bruins, this could be rough on a centre, but Primeau, a slender fellow of 160 pounds, took everything they could hand out to make his plays for us.
Joe used to have his troubles, even with Jackson and me. Both of us loved to get that puck and roar in on the goalkeeper and, of course, if Primeau slid the puck to Busher when 1 figured he ought to see that 1 was flying down the right boards looking for it, well, then I used to growl at him for not passing to me. Same thing when he did slide it over to me; Jackson would get hot. around the collar because he didn’t get the pass.
"You two guys will drive me nuts,” the mild Primeau complained one night. "The only way I'll ever satisfy you is if 1 cut the puck in half.”
I guess Primeau, in his quiet determined way, is the only centre who could have handled a couple of big singleminded birds like us, and he did all right with us both. Jackson won the NHL scoring championship in the 1931-32 season, and then 1 won it twice in a row, in 1933-34 and again in 34-35. Without those passes from Primeau and the punishment he took in making our plays on the net possible we'd never have done it.
https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1957/4/27/how-id-make-hockey-a-better-game
To my mind, the reason colorful players have disappeared to be replaced by a faceless scurrying band is that the amateur associations have permitted the professionals to bulldoze them into accepting NHL methods as their methods. Young players are regimented into a standardized mold where they play NHL rules and follow NHL theories of attack and defense. Kids rarely play shinny any more, weaving in and out with a puck, learning to stickhandle and skate in a helter-skelter incubator that hatches their natural ability. They’re so completely organized and regimented that they don’t get a chance to develop any individual characteristics. But you can’t regiment talent. How could you develop an artist, say, if you took him when he was twelve and for the next eight years told him how to put every daub of paint, every stroke of his brush, on the canvas? If they want kids to develop their skills the amateurs ought to throw out all those fancy red lines and circles they’ve got on the rinks these days, toss a puck onto the ice and let the players learn the rudiments of passing the puck, stickhandling and skating. Then the good ones would begin to emerge, just as the Howes and the Richards and the Beliveaus have emerged—and, incidentally, have you ever watched two more unorthodox hockey players than Howe and Richard? These two break every rule that today’s regimentalists are instilling into kids, and they’re two of the alltime greats. Positional play? Howe wanders all over the ice. Backcheck? Richard detests it. I've heard a lot of people say that all Richard can do is put the puck in the net. That’s like saying that all Ted Williams can do is hit. If putting the puck in the net isn’t the most important thing in hockey, why do they keep score? Richard, to me, is the greatest ot all the right-wingers, just as Howie Morenz was the greatest centre I ever saw. Béliveau is coming fast and I think you II soon be able to class him with the alltime greats. At left wing, my old linemate on the Kid Line, Busher Jackson, had tremendous natural ability but I d have to say that game in and game out led Lindsay is the best left-winger. Eddie Shore and Ching Johnson were the best defensemen I’ve ever seen and my all-time goalkeeper is little Roy Worters.
Bernard Geoffrion
THE HIGHEST SCORING BARITONE IN HISTORY | Maclean's | SEPTEMBER 22 1962
Many hockey people, including Canadiens’ coach Toe Blake, believe that Geoffrion’s immensely powerful shot was the principle cause for an NHL rules change a few years ago. When Geoffrion first came into the NHL. in 1950. a team that had a minor penalty had to play five men against six for a full two minutes. “When we had our power play with Gcoffrion on the point (a position near the blue line usually played by a forward like Geoffrion when a team has an advantage), we were getting so many goals that they had to do something to make the game more even.” Blake says. Now, as soon as the unpenalized team scores a goal, the penalized player is allowed to return to the ice.
Frank Mahovlich
VIVA MAHOVLICH! | Maclean's | February 25 1961
First, you'd have to say his style, the way he skates. There are other excellent skaters in the NHL—Henri Richard, certainly, and Bobby Hull. Mahovlich himself says that Carl Brewer, a defenseman with the Leafs, is faster. But no one else is so elegant, so electric, so furious, so fluid. The skater across the page, even though his number is hidden under a practice uniform, could be no one but Mahovlich, as anyone who has seen him, even on television, will tell you. Other skaters stride, he swoops. They glide, he soars. They sprint, he explodes. Head dowm. shoulder up, legs churning, one hand on his stick. Mahovlich looks like the Super Continental coming through Saskatchewan, and he is almost as powerful and as hard to knock down.
And there are the goals. There is. after all, nothing quite like a goal. Mahovlich can spot an opportunity to score the way Billy the Kid could spot a slow draw. Then he circles like an eagle, pounces like a panther, strikes with the accuracy of a king cobra. In one game in Boston this winter, he took five shots and scored four goals. He has been scoring one of every four the Leafs get.
And. like all other real champions. Mahovlich is lucky. Of his first forty goals this season, there were at least four that, because of empty nets or perfect passes or defensive lapses. Mazo de la Roche could have scored.
But the most distinctive quality about Mahovlich is his laziness. He is like the little girl who had the little curl: when he is good he is very, very good and when he is bad he stinks up the place. He is so lazy that his laziness takes on a sort of heroism. No one but a great star could be that lazy. He calls it “positional hockey.” but it looks from the stands as if. while his teammates are battling heroically to get the puck out of their own end, Mahovlich is preparing to take a nap at centre ice. This drives the customers berserk. The result is that when Mahovlich is on the ice he is cither being roundly cheered or lustily booed (one lady in the east blues boos him all the time, on principle) but he is always being watched.
If Pete’n’Frank could only be a little more like Jean’n’Guy | Maclean's | FEBRUARY 9, 1976
Admittedly Frank does march to a different drum—even after the band stops playing. Peter? Well, his incisive analytical mind would prod him to cut a hole in the drum to see what made the boom. Frank is as a black-thatched swan. He could always skate circles around his peers in the NHL The problem was that they became ever-increasing circles. On nights these circles took him in the same direction as the puck, he scored big. On other nights . . . well at least his tracings in compulsory figures were more accurate than Karen Magnussen’s. He scored 533 goals in the NHL without working up a sweat. But if he’d only sweated and scored a mere 100, he’d have been as popular in Montreal as, well, Jimmy Roberts.
Marcel Dionne
KING OF THE KINGS | Maclean's | MARCH 24, 1980
Los Angeles, however, offered both the best money and the farthest escape. “It was the easiest way to go,” Dionne says. With the accusations trailing him—“He can rip a team apart,” Johnny Wilson, one former coach offered—he came to a team that had just had its best season, standing fourth over-all, and was offering defensive, disciplined hockey under coach Bobby Pulford. He was suspect from the beginning. Pulford hadn’t even been told about Cooke’s deal and was so distraught at first sight of his stocky little star that he assigned him immediately to the team’s “Fàt Squad,” forced him to skate extra laps at practice with plastic sheets wrapped around his swollen stomach. But this time Dionne did not walk out on practice, as he had done in Detroit. And instead of sulking, as he might once have done, he worked and listened. “Pully thought I was a zipperhead,” Dionne now says. “If he could’ve made me crawl, he would have. I wouldn’t crawl. I respect him for what he did because after a while he knew I was not what he had heard.”
Pulford discovered, as so many others have, that the tallest part of Dionne is his pride. “I don’t want to kiss anyone’s ass,” he had decided just before turning professional and, though he has certainly suffered for his refreshing frankness, hockey’s own belated maturing over recent years has meant that Detroit’s “big baby” is now seen as Los Angeles’ leader and highly articulate spokesman—without Dionne himself having changed much. He once said, “There seems to be a tiny part of me I can’t control.” But his railing against archaic management and gang-warfare hockey has in truth been extremely calculated. “If I had to do it again,” he says, “I’d do it. And I’d tell you why— because I know I can play for any team in this league.” Before Dionne, the outspoken hockey player was a rarity—Ted Lindsay in the ’50s, Bobby Hull to a lesser extent later—but today, with Darryl Sittler fighting management in Toronto and Guy Lafleur attacking lazy, wealthy hockey players in Montreal, the cures for the ill health of hockey are coming, as it should, from the game’s healthier cells. “I had to say to hell with it,” says Dionne. “If that’s what hockey’s all about, I’ll say it. It depends on how much guts you have and how much you believe in yourself.”
Charlie Conacher
https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1957/3/2/me-and-my-family-the-story-of-the-conachers
When I started playing hockey as a kid 1 was terrible. We lived three doors away from Jesse Ketchum school where there were two hockey rinks and a pleasure rink. I was so bad as a skater that they made me the goalkeeper to get me out of the way. But when Lionel, who was nine years older, started to make a go of it in hockey and started bringing in a few dollars I knew I had to succeed.
I just about lived on that rink. I practiced shooting the puck against the boards for hours, and I mean for hours. I skated until I thought my legs would drop off. Even when 1 made the Leafs I kept at it. They didn’t play on Sundays in the NHL then so I used to go down to the old Mutual Street Arena, which pre-dated Maple Leaf Gardens, and practice with Lome Chabot, our goaltender. Poor Chabot, how I used to black-and-blue him! I'd spend an hour, just shooting for spots. Then another hour skating in on him. not shooting, but trying to outguess him, to fake him out of position before tucking the puck in the net. He'd tell me where my fakes weren't fooling him, and I taught him how to cover the angles. We’d have side bets for a drink or a sandwich or whatever; I’d bet him I could outguess him six times out of ten, and it got so that I could always do it, too. Sportswriters have often written that I had the hardest shot in hockey, and Turk Broda and Roy Worters, who had something like thirty years of NHL goalkeeping between them, claim this is so, too. If it’s true 1 just want to say that I acquired it the hard way.
https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1957/3/16/big-moments-i-remember
https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1957/3/30/lionel-could-do-anything
https://archive.macleans.ca/article...hers-part-iv-why-the-kid-line-became-a-legend
You still hear the centreman called a playmaker sometimes these days but usually he isn’t. Under the rules and the pattern of offense of the Thirties he had to be— he’d take the puck up the middle and then try to draw the defense together to stop him so that he could then make a play to one of his wingmen cutting in from the side. With defensemen like Ching Johnson and Taffy Abel of the Rangers, and Eddie Shore and Lionel Hitchman of the Bruins, this could be rough on a centre, but Primeau, a slender fellow of 160 pounds, took everything they could hand out to make his plays for us.
Joe used to have his troubles, even with Jackson and me. Both of us loved to get that puck and roar in on the goalkeeper and, of course, if Primeau slid the puck to Busher when 1 figured he ought to see that 1 was flying down the right boards looking for it, well, then I used to growl at him for not passing to me. Same thing when he did slide it over to me; Jackson would get hot. around the collar because he didn’t get the pass.
"You two guys will drive me nuts,” the mild Primeau complained one night. "The only way I'll ever satisfy you is if 1 cut the puck in half.”
I guess Primeau, in his quiet determined way, is the only centre who could have handled a couple of big singleminded birds like us, and he did all right with us both. Jackson won the NHL scoring championship in the 1931-32 season, and then 1 won it twice in a row, in 1933-34 and again in 34-35. Without those passes from Primeau and the punishment he took in making our plays on the net possible we'd never have done it.
https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1957/4/27/how-id-make-hockey-a-better-game
To my mind, the reason colorful players have disappeared to be replaced by a faceless scurrying band is that the amateur associations have permitted the professionals to bulldoze them into accepting NHL methods as their methods. Young players are regimented into a standardized mold where they play NHL rules and follow NHL theories of attack and defense. Kids rarely play shinny any more, weaving in and out with a puck, learning to stickhandle and skate in a helter-skelter incubator that hatches their natural ability. They’re so completely organized and regimented that they don’t get a chance to develop any individual characteristics. But you can’t regiment talent. How could you develop an artist, say, if you took him when he was twelve and for the next eight years told him how to put every daub of paint, every stroke of his brush, on the canvas? If they want kids to develop their skills the amateurs ought to throw out all those fancy red lines and circles they’ve got on the rinks these days, toss a puck onto the ice and let the players learn the rudiments of passing the puck, stickhandling and skating. Then the good ones would begin to emerge, just as the Howes and the Richards and the Beliveaus have emerged—and, incidentally, have you ever watched two more unorthodox hockey players than Howe and Richard? These two break every rule that today’s regimentalists are instilling into kids, and they’re two of the alltime greats. Positional play? Howe wanders all over the ice. Backcheck? Richard detests it. I've heard a lot of people say that all Richard can do is put the puck in the net. That’s like saying that all Ted Williams can do is hit. If putting the puck in the net isn’t the most important thing in hockey, why do they keep score? Richard, to me, is the greatest ot all the right-wingers, just as Howie Morenz was the greatest centre I ever saw. Béliveau is coming fast and I think you II soon be able to class him with the alltime greats. At left wing, my old linemate on the Kid Line, Busher Jackson, had tremendous natural ability but I d have to say that game in and game out led Lindsay is the best left-winger. Eddie Shore and Ching Johnson were the best defensemen I’ve ever seen and my all-time goalkeeper is little Roy Worters.
TheDevilMadeMe
Registered User
So I'm still not entirely sure what to do with Ted Kennedy. His playoff heroics should be unquestioned by now. Same with his two-way play and leadership. And he's often listed as the best faceoff man of all-time. And his Hart voting is better than anyone else left. Shoo-in, right?
But his regular season offense is just so unimpressive for a guy appearing at this point. From Hockey Outsider's tables, here are the 7 year VsX scores of Kennedy and some other players with varying levels of two-way ability: Reference - VsX comprehensive summary (1927 to 2018)
Pavel Datsyuk 82.5
Marian Hossa 82.4
Doug Gilmour 82.0
Mike Modano 81. 5
Sergei Fedorov 80.8
Henrik Zetterberg 79.5
Anze Kopitar 79.2
Patrik Elias 78.9
Ted Kennedy 78.8
Hooley Smith 78.0
Jacques Lemaire 77.9
Phil Watson 76.7
Phil Goyette 75.2
Dave Keon 74.3
Rick Middleton 74.1
Patrick Marleau 73.2
Jonathan Toews 72.7
Rod Brind'amour 72.6
But as Kyle more or less mentioned, is Kennedy a guy who rarely played on the PP, playing on the same team as Apps and/or Bentley for most of his prime?
But his regular season offense is just so unimpressive for a guy appearing at this point. From Hockey Outsider's tables, here are the 7 year VsX scores of Kennedy and some other players with varying levels of two-way ability: Reference - VsX comprehensive summary (1927 to 2018)
Pavel Datsyuk 82.5
Marian Hossa 82.4
Doug Gilmour 82.0
Mike Modano 81. 5
Sergei Fedorov 80.8
Henrik Zetterberg 79.5
Anze Kopitar 79.2
Patrik Elias 78.9
Ted Kennedy 78.8
Hooley Smith 78.0
Jacques Lemaire 77.9
Phil Watson 76.7
Phil Goyette 75.2
Dave Keon 74.3
Rick Middleton 74.1
Patrick Marleau 73.2
Jonathan Toews 72.7
Rod Brind'amour 72.6
But as Kyle more or less mentioned, is Kennedy a guy who rarely played on the PP, playing on the same team as Apps and/or Bentley for most of his prime?
overpass
Registered User
- Jun 7, 2007
- 5,269
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No. Kennedy really didn't play that much with Apps, and Bentley always played the point in the latter part of his career so he didn't block Kennedy.
Kennedy's rankings in PP points on Toronto in his full seasons (excluding 45-46) were as follows: 2, 1, 8, 1, 4, 2, 2, t-1, 2, 2. For the most part it's what you'd expect from a #1C who wasn't an elite offensive player.
The only season where Kennedy may have had less PP time was 1947-48, the season that Kennedy, Apps, and Bentley played together. Kennedy had 38 ESP and 8 PPP. Apps had 30 ESP/18 PPP, and Bentley had 31 ESP/23 PPP. Kennedy's 38 ESP was only 10th in the league, so it's not as if he would have been a league leader with more PP time.
BenchBrawl
Registered User
- Jul 26, 2010
- 30,850
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Didn't Toronto struggle the year (45-46) Kennedy missed a lot of games? I'm not sure if that's the cause of the struggle, but if it is, then his level of offense is a secondary concern.
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MXD
Original #4
- Oct 27, 2005
- 50,755
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They did allow lots of goals (which appears to be the main reason for the struggles -- they had no problems scoring goals), but that's probably best explained by the fact Frank McCool, Baz Bastien and Gordie Bell played, collectively, probably 35 more games than they should have in a post-WWII NHL. Neither would play a single NHL game past that season (well, McCool might have, and I'm probably overly harsh with him, but the guy had legit health issues and it's hard to believe it didn't impact his performance to some extent). Also, the Leafs D would get completely revamped between 45-46 and 46-47.
Turk Broda wasn't THAT great either, but some of that can be attributed to WWII rust (and the fact that Broda was both not getting any younger and not a super impressive athletic specimen... and never the greatest regular season goaltender in the first place).
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ted2019
History of Hockey
To me, Kennedy was his generations Claude Lemieux in regards of coming up clutch in the playoffs. His regular season really isn't that impressive for a forward up this early on the list, but he came up big in big moments.
Canadiens1958
Registered User
Claude Lemieux never was the checking center like Kennedy facing the oppositions top line.
More to hockey than raw offensive play.
DannyGallivan
Your world frightens and confuses me
Canadiens1958
Registered User
DannyGallivan
Your world frightens and confuses me
That's certainly not a feather in Kennedy's cap. For all his strengths, Clarke was a clunky skater. When it comes to Kennedy, are we wise to overlook middling regular season production? Middling playoff production has certainly hurt Dionne. Even if playoffs are the real show, we're looking at a players' total body of work. As it is, I've temporarily placed Kennedy higher on my list than I had originally based soley on the playoffs.
Canadiens1958
Registered User
Ted Kennedy was Bobby Clarke in terms of skating ability. Henri Richard was a much better skater.
Nick Hansen
Registered User
- Sep 28, 2017
- 3,120
- 2,651
How so?
Kennedy has Hart-1, Hart-2 and Hart-5x2. Bathgate has Hart-1, Hart-2, Hart-3 and a Hart-5.
Canadiens1958
Registered User
Henri Richard could skate with Bobby Hull. No one else could. At 36 Henri Richard outskated 23 year old Bobby Clarke in the playoffs in 1973.
Kennedy's era, featured puck control centers. Without scoring wingers Kennedy was the 1951 RS assist leader ahead of Abel who centered Howe and Lindsay.
TheDevilMadeMe
Registered User
Okay, I'll check @Hockey Outsider 's table from the first page. (Side note - did you not see the original table I was commenting on?)
Ted Kennedy Hart non-trivial finishes: 1st (1955), 2nd (1950), 5th (1948), 5th (1951), 5th (1953), 5th (1954), 7th (1945)
Andy Bathgate Hart non-trivial finishes: 1st (1959), 2nd (1958), 3rd (1957), 5th (1962), 8th (1956), 9th (1963)
HO's table is slightly different that what I posted, I assume because his threshold for what counts as a meaningful vote count (5%) is higher than mine (mine is basically at least 2 votes).
Either way, Kennedy has more than the 2 5th place finishes you show. Are you just using hockey-reference? They are well-known for having incomplete data when it comes to awards records.
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Kyle McMahon
Registered User
- May 10, 2006
- 13,301
- 4,353
How do you figure Kennedy's regular season offense is well behind Schmidt's? Schmidt has the best singular season, his 1939-40 scoring title, but beyond that they are nearly indistinguishable. Unless Kennedy is getting no credit at all for his war time seasons, which I think is a little unfair considering he was a teenager. Kennedy retired with a slightly higher career points-per-game average than Schmidt, albeit in about 100 fewer games played. At a glance, it appears both players had seven or eight seasons scoring at a high enough rate over a large enough number of games played to be considered "offensively relevant" to that particular season, for lack of a better term. I think Schmidt has the edge, but it's not a large one.
TheDevilMadeMe
Registered User
Again, related to my previous post, here are the lowest 7 year VsX scores of any forwards added so far (Not including pre-1926 players like Nighbor) :
Mark Messier 89.6
Milt Schmidt 86.9
Henri Richard 85.2
Kennedy's score is 78.8
Milt Schmidt top points rankings: 1, 4, 4, 10
Ted Kennedy top points rankings: 4, 5, 5, 9
I mean.... I guess you can argue that Schmidt's advantage is mostly because of his Art Ross winning season when his line went 1-2-3 in NHL scoring.
Ideally, I would like for there to be something of a gap between Schmidt and Kennedy... but then I look at who else is available this round, and I don't know.
Kyle McMahon
Registered User
- May 10, 2006
- 13,301
- 4,353
I think the regular season gap is bridged by the playoff gap in this instance. I think there was general agreement last round that Schmidt's playoff career is befitting of his regular season career for the most part. Kennedy clearly went above and beyond come playoff time. Between 1945 and 1951, Toronto won the Cup five times in six playoff appearances. The only time they didn't just happened to be the one time Kennedy didn't produce offensively.
BenchBrawl
Registered User
- Jul 26, 2010
- 30,850
- 13,635
The question of what to do with Ted Kennedy is connected to how you see Jonathan Toews' place in an all-time sense.The dilemma is right there: Kennedy's offense is not that good, yet he was the cornerstone of a dynasty.Same with Jonathan Toews.The difference between the two is one of degree, not kind.If you have Kennedy high, you cannot rank say Adam Oates over Jonathan Toews.
I realize this is off-topic, but it's more about a general way of ranking heart and soul all-around centers with underwhelming offense.
I realize this is off-topic, but it's more about a general way of ranking heart and soul all-around centers with underwhelming offense.
Dennis Bonvie
Registered User
All-Star Selections
At the point where most candidates have lots of all-star selections but more 2nd team.
Earl Seibert - 4 first teams 6 second teams (3 first team selections in WWII era)
Frank Mahovlich - 3 first team 6 second team
Tim Horton - 3 first team 3 second team
Charlie Conacher - 3 first team 2 second team
Frank Brimsek - 2 first team 6 second team
Marcel Dionne - 2 first team 2 second team (tougher for centers)
Andy Bathgate - 2 first team, 2 second team
Chris Pronger - 1 first team, 3 second team
Bernie Geoffrion - 1 first team, 2 second team
Teeder Kennedy - 0 first team, 3 second team (tougher for centers)
Cleghorn pre-dates all-star voting
At the point where most candidates have lots of all-star selections but more 2nd team.
Earl Seibert - 4 first teams 6 second teams (3 first team selections in WWII era)
Frank Mahovlich - 3 first team 6 second team
Tim Horton - 3 first team 3 second team
Charlie Conacher - 3 first team 2 second team
Frank Brimsek - 2 first team 6 second team
Marcel Dionne - 2 first team 2 second team (tougher for centers)
Andy Bathgate - 2 first team, 2 second team
Chris Pronger - 1 first team, 3 second team
Bernie Geoffrion - 1 first team, 2 second team
Teeder Kennedy - 0 first team, 3 second team (tougher for centers)
Cleghorn pre-dates all-star voting
Nick Hansen
Registered User
- Sep 28, 2017
- 3,120
- 2,651
Hockey-reference is weird. Did somebody die and they stopped adding the results to the charts or what the hell happened? I stand corrected. But a Hart-3 maybe amounts to two Hart-5 votes, especially during that era...
Also weird how Sawchuk received 35 Hart-1 votes despite only playing 34 games out of a 70 game season. Clearly people were enarmoured with him in a way that doesn't reflect reality. Narratives do matter.
Nick Hansen
Registered User
- Sep 28, 2017
- 3,120
- 2,651
When I looked att Kennedy, the two first players I thought of were Joe Thornton and Martin St Louis.
Thornton: Hart-1, Hart-4, Hart-5x2 Hart-6 and Hart-9, 1 Ross, 3xAS2 and 1xAS1. St Louis' got: 2xRoss, Hart-1 and Hart-3, 4xAs-2 and AS-1, Pearson.
Kennedy clearly has the best playoff record out of these guys, though St Louis certainly wasn't bad in the playoffs. Thornton's reputation is a bit ballooned up because of how great he is in RS IMO. He's not great but not bad either. Kind of like Bäckström.
Point finishes:
Kennedy: 4,5,5,9
Thornton: 1,2,3,4,5,8
St Louis: 1,1,2,5,6
I'd personally not categorize either Thornton or St Louis as bad defensively, particularly not in the back half of their careers. Though Kennedy beats them clearly there as well.
Thornton: Hart-1, Hart-4, Hart-5x2 Hart-6 and Hart-9, 1 Ross, 3xAS2 and 1xAS1. St Louis' got: 2xRoss, Hart-1 and Hart-3, 4xAs-2 and AS-1, Pearson.
Kennedy clearly has the best playoff record out of these guys, though St Louis certainly wasn't bad in the playoffs. Thornton's reputation is a bit ballooned up because of how great he is in RS IMO. He's not great but not bad either. Kind of like Bäckström.
Point finishes:
Kennedy: 4,5,5,9
Thornton: 1,2,3,4,5,8
St Louis: 1,1,2,5,6
I'd personally not categorize either Thornton or St Louis as bad defensively, particularly not in the back half of their careers. Though Kennedy beats them clearly there as well.
MXD
Original #4
- Oct 27, 2005
- 50,755
- 16,484
How are St-Louis and Thornton anything alike Ted Kennedy?
The Macho King
Back* to Back** World Champion
- Jun 22, 2011
- 48,712
- 29,153
Eh - MSL is one of my favorite players ever, but he was pretty bad defensively. He was used on the PK at times, but it was mainly because of his speed and not defensive acumen.
GlitchMarner
Typical malevolent, devious & vile Maple Leafs fan
Is Kennedy significantly better than guys like Fedorov, Gilmour and Keon? They all have two-way play and good playoff records in common and weren't otherwordly offensively (compared to some of the best players ever).
Canadiens1958
Registered User
Canadiens1958
Registered User
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