Canadiens1958
Registered User
Two more defensemen:
Eddie Gerard. I'm probably more appreciative of Gerard than most guys (he's a defenseman, and he played 100 years ago), but like TDMM, I'm not 100% sure he's a top-100 player. I was one of the people who kick-started the appreciation of Gerard in an off-hfboards ATD in 2008, while at hfboards he had just risen from 361st to 204th, and has now plateaued at 89th-102nd the past seven drafts. He seems to be a player you "really had to be there" to appreciate. Very much like Serge Savard in that respect. I don't know if it's fair to say cups "followed him around"; if anything, the cup followed Nighbor around. His career was extremely short - just nine years in a time when quite a few elite defensemen were able to play forever (Cleghorn, Johnson, Hall, Patrick, Boucher, Cameron all played 14-20 years). Would someone like to take a stab at what Gerard's all-star voting record would look like? It would be nice to get a sense for what the quality of his short peak was, in order to know what we should think of him with relation to guys like Keith, Karlsson and Leetch. I know it's really difficult considering offense should not be that important in such things, and that's half of what we have (the other half being his team's defensive performance, knowing he played most/all of the minutes).
Valeri Vasiliev. He seems to really define the term "borderline top-100 player" for me. I've read everything posted about him thus far in the project and I feel like I'm not quite as high on him as I used to be. Or it might just be that too many good new players have come up in the past decade and he's exactly the caliber of player that is in position to get nudged out. With European forwards of the 70s and 80s, I don't find it all that difficult to fudge some regular season numbers and get an idea of where they would rank in a global league on a year-to-year basis. But I refuse to use offense to judge defensemen in any significant way, so the best thing we have is Vasiliev's eye-test based all-star voting record. But what do you do with it? When he was the best Soviet defenseman, where did that rank him in the world? You can probably safely say never 1st, but he very well could have been 2nd a couple times. There might also be times where even in that competitive era, a top-end all-star soviet defenseman might have only been 10th-15th in the world - who can say? Has anyone cooked up a fair and realistic assessment of what his NHL all-star record may have looked like? As with Firsov, I don't mean literally pretend he crosses the atlantic and starts playing here, but just base it on skill/talent, and overall quality of play and value delivered. Was he a potential NHL all-star, and how many times? I'm open to ranking him for sure, but he's a question mark in a field of so many sure things.
Centers:
Nels Stewart. There's lots to not like, but there's also lots to like. For starters, are we going to keep out the only multiple Hart winner remaining? He's also a top-5 finisher one other time, not exactly insignificant at this point in the process. He's a two-time goals leader, one-time points leader, and is probably the best example after Newsy Lalonde, of a player who didn't always lead in goals and/or points, but was always right there in the mix, year after year, for a very long time. He hit the ground running as an NHL rookie, and if that makes you wonder how much earlier he could have been a good NHL player, you're barking up the right tree. For three seasons prior to his NHL debut at 23, he was a very dominant scorer in the USAHA, a very strong league whose Pittsburgh Yellowjackets, almost player-for-player became the NHL's Pirates in 1925-26 and went 19-16-1. By my rough league-equivalency numbers, I give him scores of 77, 75 and 73, which fall just outside of his top-10 seasons and should not in any way move the needle for what you think of his peak, but do significantly add to his already impressive longevity case. If you're wondering whether having a big, slow, poor defensively, bully of a center was a winning strategy for his teams, the Maroons were 20 games over .500 in 7 seasons with him, and the Bruins were 13 games over in 3 more seasons, before he went to the Americans, who were, of course, never good. On the other hand, when games got tighter and competition got tougher, Stewart's teams were 21-27-6 in the playoffs, which is not great, but it's both better and worse if you break it up into two parts: 8-5-4 through 1928, and 13-22-2 after that. Stewart played in a time where award voters and reporters were not going to just be seduced by stats and send votes and platitudes to the highest scorers - we see evidence of that all over the place. But Stewart passed the eye test enough to end up with the best individual trophy case of his era and arguably all-time too, among available players, that is. He was a highly significant player to his era, and yes, all-time as well. He has to be on the list.
Norm Ullman. This one may be a little detailed, so allow me to break from my usual "one paragraph" format just this once.
offense: Back in the day before quantitative measures like VsX were a thing, and we counted up top-10 finishes as a way of explaining dominance, Ullman looked outstanding. Eight times in the top-10 in points, and seven more times in the top-20 for a total of 15 significant seasons. And then some people would say, "yeah, but it was the original six, there were 18 first line spots, of course Ullman was going to be in the top-20!" But, 1) playing and excelling in the O6 environment is a plus, not a minus, 2) Ullman was usually not a first line player, 3) When we shifted to quantitative measures like VsX, Ullman still looked rather excellent. Definitely some shine comes off of his 1957, 1958, 1959 and 1964 seasons from 10th-19th in scoring, but it also highlights how his 16th in 1963 and his 17th in 1972 are really not to be ignored and are just as significant as his pair of 12ths in 1960 and 1969. He was a very significant scorer for a very long time.
I think the more you look at his offense, though, the more you like it. For a few reasons:
- Ullman did not get a chance to shine on the PP nearly as much as some players. On the most recent and complete spreadsheet that I have (1960-2017), he is 57th in points by forwards. Out of the top-100 (down to players with 869 points), he is 81st in PP usage: 51%. That is still a good number for PP usage, but the average for players of this ilk is 61% and more than a quarter of them are up over 70%. Ullman's usage on the PP was more like that of Pat Verbeek, Rod Brind'Amour and Bobby Smith, than guys like hawerchuk (72%), Federko (72%), Stastny (71%), and Thornton (69%). (only Muller, Thomas, Roberts and Hunter on this list are below 44%).
- So you must be thinking, to end up with those kinds of raw offensive totals despite stunted PP opportunities, he must have been excellent at even strength. You would be absolutely right; he was excellent at even strength. Out of 927 forwards with 500+ games on this spreadsheet, Ullman is 18th in ESP/80. The players ahead of him are Gretzky, Lemieux, Crosby, Bobby Hull, Forsberg, Lindros, Jagr, Malkin, Bossy, Ovechkin, Bure, Richard, Sakic, Esposito, Kane, Beliveau, and Howe - a mix of very dominant full-career players, and a few guys who are all-prime like Forsberg, Lindros, Bure, and to a lesser extent, Crosby, Malkin, Ovechkin and Kane, the latter two who will almost certainly drop below his number once they've played 1100+ games themselves. He's also not-insignificantly ahead of Yzerman, Bathgate, Dionne, Brett Hull, Selanne, Kurri, and Fedorov, just to name a few already-inducted players (not to mention currently available names Stastny, St. Louis and Iginla).
- Now, don't forget, these are full-career numbers. Ullman amassed these even-strength figures over a very long career (over 1100 games captured by this spreadsheet). If we were to just isolate everyone's best 7 or 10 seasons as an even strength scorer, Ullman would look even better: He has an excellent string of ES points finishes: 1-2-3-4-5-6-7, strangely enough, with another half dozen in the 9th-12th range, including one in his 2nd last NHL season in 1974 at the age of 38.
- Ullman's linemate situation left a lot to be desired. For most of his career, he was by far the best player on his line and had to do it all himself at even strength. On the PP, he surely had some opportunities with Howe and others, but his linemates were often glorified checkers like Floyd Smith, who he elevated to secondary scorer-status. If Ullman wasn't participating in the offense, it wasn't going in. Out of that same list of 927 forwards from 1960-2017 with 500 games, Ullman is 40th in his offensive participation score of 79% - so he participated in 79% of the even strength goals that his team scored with him on the ice. Elite players by this metric tend to be pretty tightly packed, but he looks the best among this group by this metric: Iginla is the closest at 78%, St. Louis and Lindros are at 77% and Stastny is at 75%. Only Thornton ties him at 79%. In case you are wondering if this stat is in any way meaningful, yes, the elite players rise to the top - the highest are Crosby, Beliveau, Elias, Malkin and Gretzky, while enforcers occupy the bottom spots.
Given his unique situation, I find his offensive record to be the most impressive of all forwards in this round. Imagine Thornton or St. Louis with 2nd/3rd line caliber linemates and restricted PP usage. Imagine them doing that in the Original six era!
defense: many quotes from throughout Ullman's career paint him as a very hard-working, highly conscientious defensive player. This bio here: ATD2011 Bio Thread contains most, but not all of what I dug up on him a few years prior. It's nothing but highly complementary. He was not Dave Keon or Henri Richard, but his defensive game, by the eye test, leaves little to be desired. Ullman would be the 2nd/3rd best defensive forward available in this round, well behind Keon and virtually tied with Abel - with no one else even close.
playoffs: Unfortunately for Ullman, it's feast and famine. If you look at a metric like playoff VsX, which zeroes in specifically on his five best playoffs, then he looks excellent, because his 1st-1st-2nd in playoff scoring give him scores of 136, 100, 100, and a five year score of 89. On the other hand, outside of those five seasons he has 21 points in 56 games. It results in a mixed bag playoff record that resulted in no cups, and a stat line of 83 points in 106 games, which is actually pretty decent overall - a better scoring rate than Keon and Richard, and just short of Delvecchio and Mahovlich. The Rn and R
other: It was mentioned that he was a #2 center. Let's get serious here. While it's true that he was usually a second liner, thanks to the desire to spread the scoring out in Detroit's lineup, this does not mean he was not one of the NHL's best six centers. Of course he was no Mikita, Beliveau or Richard, but for the majority of his prime he would be the next name you'd come up with in the conversation of best centers. And despite not having the benefit of the "easier" aspects of being a top line center (better linemates, more icetime, guaranteed top unit PP), he did have to face some of the tougher aspects of it (like carrying weaker linemates while going up against top units). Don't forget that after Ullman was traded to Toronto, he became their #1, all-around, all-situations center, and Punch Imlach called him the best center he ever coached. At 33-39, he put up a 1.17 GF/GA ratio while the Leafs were merely even (1.00) with him off the ice. Indeed, he came out positive for his career (1.03-1.00) despite having the Gordie Howe/Alex Delvecchio tandem as an off-ice comparable for half the time covered by those numbers. Yes, Ullman was a difference maker and he absolutely belongs in the last ten spots here.
more to come later.
Nice to see that ATD matters, at least for Gerard. Perhaps for Hasek it will in the future. He was picked 26th in the latest edition. Then you have interesting anomalities. Bill Gadsby #64, Rod Langway #65, MarkHowe #77, Toe Blake #79, Serge Savard #82, Norm Ullman #90, Evgeni Malkin #97, Frank Brimsek #100.
Others are pretty close in rank in the Top 100 and the ATD.
Years you made the point about the competition aspect of history. This illustrates your point. ATD, effectively you have to have a strategy, make the best choice or face the consequences of a weak team. Top 100 there are no consequences that counter-balance ratings.
Your Imlach quote is inaccurate about Ullman. Operative is in the NHL. Imlach coached Beliveau in the QSHL - Quebec Aces.
Ullman 4th amongst centers in his prime. Bit of a moving target. Regardless, teams and centers they would not trade for Ullman or preferred to Ullman. O6 era
Detroit preferred Delvecchio. Montreal - Beliveau, Henri Richard, Backstrom. Toronto - Keon,Kelly,Pulford. Chicago-Mikita,maybe Esposito. New York, Ratelle, maybe Goyette. Boston none. Mid 1960s top two Boston centers were Oliver and Martin, former Red Wings.
