Top-100 Hockey Players of All-Time - Round 2, Vote 5

[DannyGallivan]

We just voted Potvin in ahead of Lafleur. I think that right there kills the notion that he was a consensus best of his generation.

...some voted him ahead.

 

[DannyGallivan]

Why?

At least with the NHL's subjective trophies, it's easier to see the context. You can watch the players, you know the competition, etc.

 

[ImporterExporter]

Sawchuk will probably be the unranked player for me this go. I have him in the 30s all time.

I'd need to see serious evidence to come off that position.

 

[MXD]

Let's call Lafleur the "Most Gifted Forward" of his generation and leave it at that.

 

[pappyline]

Right now I have Brodeur in last place but I am open to arguments to move him up. I always found New Jersey to be a boring team to watch so I didn't watch a lot of Brodeur except for the Olympics and I was not impressed with him there. He always looked shaky to me. I know Canada won but I always felt that it was in spite of Brodeur not because of him. In his last Olympics he even got replaced by Luongo. I remember thinking at the time--Now we got a chance to win this thing. Not that Luongo was great either.

Does anyone else feel this way? Am I being fair to Brodeur.

 

[Theokritos]

At least with the NHL's subjective trophies, it's easier to see the context. You can watch the players, you know the competition, etc.

Who are you referring to? I'm pretty sure the Soviet voters knew their context, players, competitions etc just as well as the NHL voters knew theirs.

 

[ImporterExporter]

Right now I have Brodeur in last place but I am open to arguments to move him up. I always found New Jersey to be a boring team to watch so I didn't watch a lot of Brodeur except for the Olympics and I was not impressed with him there. He always looked shaky to me. I know Canada won but I always felt that it was in spite of Brodeur not because of him. In his last Olympics he even got replaced by Luongo. I remember thinking at the time--Now we got a chance to win this thing. Not that Luongo was great either.

Does anyone else feel this way? Am I being fair to Brodeur.

I plan on having a very thorough look and write up on Marty tonight. His puck moving and handling skills were a big reason why NJ was so successful. He was so good at it the league altered where goalies can play the puck.

His adjusted numbers for era are quite good and he has some stellar postseason runs to his name. I'll be sure to tag you in the write up since you asked about him specifically.

 

[seventieslord]

Mikita under Esposito would be flat out wrong.

QFT

Top 5 Hart finishes Red Wings in the 1950s:

Gordie Howe: 1st (1952), 1st (1953), 1st (1957), 1st (1958), 2nd (1959), 3rd (1951), 4th (1954),
Red Kelly: 2nd (1954), 3rd (1951), 3rd (1953), 4th (1956)
Terry Sawchuk: 4th (1952), 4th (1959), 4th (1957 with Boston)
Ted Lindsay: none (but 4th in 1949)

Yikes. And no goalie biasbos the time, either.

I was really hard on Sawchuk on my list, but others were even harder. I'm surprised he's up for voting this soon and I do not expect to rank him at this time.

 

[blogofmike]

In the O6 era, Hart voters tended to be much kinder to goalies than to defensemen, as literally no defenseman but Kelly or Harvey ever finished top 5, while numerous goaltenders did.

Sawchuk in the playoffs is a study of highs and lows - 2 of the best runs ever in 1952 and 1954, while completely blowing it for his team in 1953 and seemingly carried to the Cup by his team in 1955.

The 1955 Habs going 7 games is one of those places where I see value in Plante as the most valuable GA suppressor on the Habs, who otherwise failed defensively. Sawchuk faces 26.7 SA/60. Plante faces 38.7 SA/60.

On the road, Sawchuk kept Montreal in the series:

But I suppose this is one of those cases QPQ talks about where a goalie gives his team 4 good games.

 

[MXD]

Right now I have Brodeur in last place but I am open to arguments to move him up. I always found New Jersey to be a boring team to watch so I didn't watch a lot of Brodeur except for the Olympics and I was not impressed with him there. He always looked shaky to me. I know Canada won but I always felt that it was in spite of Brodeur not because of him. In his last Olympics he even got replaced by Luongo. I remember thinking at the time--Now we got a chance to win this thing. Not that Luongo was great either.

Does anyone else feel this way? Am I being fair to Brodeur.

My first impression was that you were not only unfair, but flat-out wrong.

Then, I realized that Brodeur always did pretty well against my teams (and in the games not necessarily involving my team.... which is, playoffs), and maybe not necessarily against other teams, so I went on HR to check this out.

Montreal Canadiens

70

45

19

6

128

1818

1690

.930

1.83

9

2

4188:56

63

22

3

[TBODY] [/TBODY]

... 63 ES goals in 70 games. SV% at .930. ... Yep. This might explain that.

Say whatever you want on the Montréal Canadiens team during Brodeur's career, but during that span, they weren't one of the worse teams by any stretch.

 

[ChiTownPhilly]

...Detroit's Russian 5. Although he was approximately 37-38 years old when Bowman put them together during the '95-'96 season, Fetisov looked great. The 5 man unit was positively dominant for the Red Wings. And the difference between Fetisov's play with that unit, and his play when the unit was split up, was immense. Fetisov (and Konstantinov) both excelled at integrating with the Russian forwards in playing what was essentially a 5 man weave game of keep away with the puck, where each player took a turn gaining possession before making a short pass off to a supporting player. Despite not playing as a unit for the entire season, the five Russians all placed top 7 in NHL +/-, with Fetisov tying for third overall. While playing in a familiar system, Fetisov still had plenty of gas in the tank.

Yes- and (of course) this was even more pronounced in earlier International competition. It was a squad you could tell was dominating even by listening to a portion of a radio broadcast- in a foreign language.

The real question for Fetisov is how much he is either rewarded or punished for being a near perfect fit for the system he was trained in and played in for the majority of his peak/prime.

He developed himself to optimize his performance in the competition-setting that was (at the time of his foundation-training) expected to encompass his entire playing career. And that training- and the competition-paradigm of his peak and prime- wasn't something over which he could have reasonably been expected to exercise a whole lot of control.

I need some Steely-Dan album-title thought-patterns to find any way one could frame this as a negative. (?)

 

[Kyle McMahon]

...some voted him ahead.

Yes, but less than a majority. At a minimum, Lafleur vs Potvin is an open question. A "consensus" favouring Lafleur as the best player over the span of his playing career is demonstrably false. With regards to Nighbor, it seems a consensus does indeed view him as the best player over the span of his career. He has appeared for discussion a minimum of two rounds before any of his direct contemporaries.

 

[Canadiens1958]

As far as individual stats go, it's quite possible that he looks even better. It's entirely possible that on a lesser team he's asked to drive the bus even more (more ice time, even more emphasis on scoring). At the very least, I've never been persuaded star players' stats are necessarily correlated with the strength of their teams.

Of course, Lafleur's ability to contribute to team accomplishments would have been diminished on a lesser team. But I can't really see how you could possibly hold that against him. Lafleur may have had the luck to be a part of the greatest team of all time, but he certainly maximized his personal results based upon that luck. Every player in history has had unique circumstances to play under . . . what matters is what they did with those circumstances. Lafleur clearly capitalized on his. Which leads me to . . .



I don't think it's nearly that clear cut. Fetisov excelled at the system his team and country played. And Fetisov developed at a time when it was almost unthinkable that he'd ever even need to consider playing a North American style of hockey.

There probably aren't very many examples of the reverse situation to prove this point. The best I can think of were experiments with "Doug Brownov", where Brown was asked to fill in for a missing Russian on the Wings 5 man unit. He did okay, but his ability to integrate into the weave and control puck possession was clearly behind not just the Russian forwards, but also the Russian defensemen. Now, Doug Brown was a great utility player, but he was hardly a star. So his inability to jump right in may very well have been caused at least as much by his talent ceiling as the system.

While we haven't seen many NHL's try to play the Russian system, we have seen periods in NHL history where there were some pretty massive rule changes. Perhaps such periods might be a better comparison to what Fetisov went through, and might offer other players of his caliber (as opposed to Doug Brown) to establish some realistic expectations.

Gilbert Perreault is the prime counterexample to your bolded hypothetical.

 

[Canadiens1958]

Who are you referring to? I'm pretty sure the Soviet voters knew their context, players, competitions etc just as well as the NHL voters knew theirs.

Curious, did the Soviet domestic leagues ever name All Star teams.

 

[Captain Bowie]

Lafleur was virtually the consensus best player of his generation too, right? That is, if you consider his generation as the one between Orr and Gretzky.

To be fair, the gap between Bobby Orr and Wayne Gretzky was 5 or 6 years. I would hardly call that a "generation".

 

[BenchBrawl]

Martin Brodeur's great puck control and the extent to which it gave NJ a comparative advantage in setting up a great defensive system would be interesting to read about.

Still not sure Lidstrom is a better hockey player than Brodeur (or Sakic), just based on the general feeling of watching all of them play and their career evolved in the same era.Disappointed that we won't see the triple comparison.

 

[DannyGallivan]

Right now I have Brodeur in last place but I am open to arguments to move him up. I always found New Jersey to be a boring team to watch so I didn't watch a lot of Brodeur except for the Olympics and I was not impressed with him there. He always looked shaky to me. I know Canada won but I always felt that it was in spite of Brodeur not because of him. In his last Olympics he even got replaced by Luongo. I remember thinking at the time--Now we got a chance to win this thing. Not that Luongo was great either.

Does anyone else feel this way? Am I being fair to Brodeur.

I've always considered him every effective in a totally unspectacular way. Also, the dead puck years and the New Jersey "system" always made me look at him sideways a little bit. I actually have the three goalies in my last three spots for this round right now, but would love to see compelling evidence to move at least one up (so it doesn't look like I'm picking on the goalies). Kinda like Mr. Goalie myself, and my all-time fave (although I never saw him play) is Sawchuk. However, right now they're all on the outside looking in.

 

[DannyGallivan]

To be fair, the gap between Bobby Orr and Wayne Gretzky was 5 or 6 years. I would hardly call that a "generation".

Semantics. The word "generational" is overused.

 

[ImporterExporter]

Yes- and (of course) this was even more pronounced in earlier International competition. It was a squad you could tell was dominating even by listening to a portion of a radio broadcast- in a foreign language.

He developed himself to optimize his performance in the competition-setting that was (at the time of his foundation-training) expected to encompass his entire playing career. And that training- and the competition-paradigm of his peak and prime- wasn't something over which he could have reasonably been expected to exercise a whole lot of control.

I need some Steely-Dan album-title thought-patterns to find any way one could frame this as a negative. (?)

I have every Steely Dan album on vinyl. Fantastic musicians IMO.

 

[DannyGallivan]

Yes, but less than a majority. At a minimum, Lafleur vs Potvin is an open question. A "consensus" favouring Lafleur as the best player over the span of his playing career is demonstrably false. With regards to Nighbor, it seems a consensus does indeed view him as the best player over the span of his career. He has appeared for discussion a minimum of two rounds before any of his direct contemporaries.

Perhaps if you're limiting your consensus to the voters in these threads, then maybe Nighbor is number one of his "generation"(I don't know, did anybody have Cyclone Taylor ahead of him?). However, there wasn't a consensus for anybody else - everybody in the last round had at least one number one vote. There was no consensus for best player overall. Same for best goalie overall. Same for best sandwich overall (I prefer grilled cheese with onions).

 

[overg]

I need some Steely-Dan album-title thought-patterns to find any way one could frame this as a negative. (?)

Well, the easy answer is that adaptability is a positive. Other players have been given credit for adapting to new teams, roles, or rules. Fetisov definitely struggled with this, so it's fair to at least consider it as a possible mark against him.

Having said that, I think the best counter to this particular argument is that most adaptations aren't nearly as severe as what Fetisov encountered. I posited earlier that perhaps players who went through drastic rule changes might form decent comparables. I still think there's some merit to exploring that, but one key difference is that when the rules change, they change for everyone, and everyone has to adapt to them. With Fetisov, he was trying to adjust to an entire league worth of players who were already playing the NHL style. His big adjustment was mainly shared by his fellow Russians, and even then, not many Russians who came over had as much time and experience under the Russian system as Fetisov did.

Depending upon just how deep one wanted to go down this particular rabbit hole, one might also question how easy the change was for Russian forwards compared to Russian defensemen. Guys like Makarov and Larionov seemed to have a somewhat easier time of it. Were they just more adaptable, or did the different positions require significantly different adaptations?

 

[Batis]

REPOST FROM THE HOH TOP NON-NHL EUROPEANS PROJECT

The Case for Slava Fetisov as the best non-NHL European hockey player of All-Time

I was hoping that you would repost this from the Non-NHL Europeans project. Another quote which highlights the greatness of Fetisov in his prime is this one from James Patrick. I kept my "analysis" in there as well.

I recently found this quote regarding the quality of prime Fetisov in a Toronto Star article published on september 17 1987, right after the end of the Canada Cup.

"Defenceman James Patrick has played the Soviets at least a dozen times with the 84 Canadian Olympic team, in the world tournament and the Canada Cup. He is an admirer of the mighty Fetisov, the Soviet defenceman whose breath could be felt on the neck of anyone you can name as best player in this tournament, even No, 99.
Of course I have not seen all the men who played that position in hockey, but has anyone ever been better than Fetisov in all parts of the game over 200 feet of ice? Patrick said."

That is some pretty high praise especially when we consider that Patrick just had spent a tournament playing on the same team as Ray Bourque when he said this. And while I dont think that Fetisov was the most complete player to ever play the game I think that his peak and prime level of play was higher than Robinsons and comparable to Potvins.

I personally rank Fetisov as the best defenceman in the world between 81/82-83/84 and one of the very best between 84/85-87/88. Therefore I think that if Fetisov would have been able to come over and adjust to the NHL at a young age it is more likely that he would win two or more Norris trophies than that he would fail to win one.

Another noteworthy thing is that Fetisov was first among defencemen in the Soviet player of the year voting 9 times (77/78 and 81/82-88/89). Pretty impressive in my opinion even if the Soviets may not have had the same depth among defencemen as they had among forwards. But he still beat out Vasiliev in 77/78 and 81/82 as well as consistently beating out Kasatonov between 81/82 and 88/89.

 

[Batis]

Top 5 finishes for "best player of the season," defensemen only:
Fetisov: 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5
Vasiliev: 3, 5
Pervukhin: 5, 5
Ragulin: 5
Kasatonov: 5

One minor thing. Vasiliev also finished 2nd in the 78/79 Izvestia golden stick voting which worked as the stand in for the SPOTY that season. Still Fetisov's advantage over the rest of the Soviet defencemen is still massive which is perhaps even more evident when it comes to voting shares.

As promised here comes the SPOTY voting shares for the defencemen. Since the Soviets produced less great defencemen than forwards I will only present the top-3 on each list. In my opinion the 3 top defencemen are the only ones who are relevant in this discussion.

Soviet player of the year voting shares (67/68-89/90)

3-year average:
1. Vyacheslav Fetisov 0.558
2. Valery Vasiliev 0.187
3. Alexey Kasatonov 0.089

5-year average:
1. Vyacheslav Fetisov 0.520
2. Valery Vasiliev 0.154
3. Alexey Kasatonov 0.073

7-year average:
1. Vyacheslav Fetisov 0.456
2. Valery Vasiliev 0.129
3. Alexey Kasatonov 0.060

And here are their results season by season.

Vyacheslav Fetisov
85/86: 184/282 = 0.652
81/82: 116/222 = 0.523
87/88: 129/258 = 0.500
88/89: 110/237 = 0.464
84/85: 122/264 = 0.462
83/84: 82/261 = 0.314
77/78: 61/219 = 0.279
82/83: 44/243 = 0.181
86/87: 27/267 = 0.101
3-year average: 0.558
5-year average: 0.520
7-year average: 0.456

Valery Vasiliev
73/74: 39/168 = 0.232
78/79: 345/1734 = 0.199
79/80: 27/207 = 0.130
74/75: 23/195 = 0.118
80/81: 20/222 = 0.090
81/82: 17/222 = 0.077
72/73: 10/177 = 0.056
76/77: 9/228 = 0.039
75/76: 2/192 = 0.010
77/78: 2/219 = 0.009
3-year average: 0.187
5-year average: 0.154
7-year average: 0.129

Alexey Kasatonov
82/83: 29/243 = 0.119
83/84: 20/261 = 0.077
84/85: 19/264 = 0.072
86/87: 16/267 = 0.060
81/82: 8/222 = 0.036
80/81: 7/222 = 0.032
87/88: 7/258 = 0.027
88/89: 5/237 = 0.021
85/86: 3/282 = 0.011
79/80: 2/207= 0.010
3-year average: 0.089
5-year average: 0.073
7-year average: 0.060

Looking at the voting shares it becomes perhaps even more clear just how much of an outlier Fetisov was among Soviet defencemen. Additionally Fetisov compares very well to most of the top forwards in the voting as well and when it comes to 7-year average Makarov is the only forward ahead of Fetisov for example. The only relative weakness on Fetisovs SPOTY voting record is that he "only" recieved votes in 9 seasons which actually is less than Vasiliev and Kasatonov who both recieved votes in 10 seasons.

It is also very clear that Vasilievs voting record is far stronger than Kasatonovs even without taking into account for that one of Vasilievs strongest seasons was in 78/79 where we only have the Izvestia golden stick voting in which it seems to have been somewhat more difficult to get a high voting share.

In my opinion one interesting discussion to have is if the SPOTY voters underrated defencemen or not. On one hand the by comparison low voting shares of the top defencemen would suggest that the answer is yes. On the other hand I also think that there are reasons to believe that the Soviet Union and later Russia have been far better at producing top forwards than top defencemen which means that the difference in strenght of voting shares can have other explanations. An example of this is of course that no Russian defenceman have won the Norris trophy and only two of them (Konstantinov and Zubov) have finished top 3 in the voting (Gonchar finished in the 4-6 range plenty of times though). Compare this to the forwards where there are three winners of both the Hart and the Pearson/Lindsay (Fedorov, Ovechkin and Malkin) and three others who have finished top 3 in the Hart voting (Yashin, Bure and Datsyuk).

It is of course also possible that the Soviet Union (even beyond the outlier Fetisov) generally produced stronger defencemen than Russia has done in modern times. The amount of accolades won by Soviet defencemen on the international stage would actually point to that. It would not surprise me either considering that much suggests that the level of Soviet hockey was somewhat higher than the level of modern Russian hockey. There was for example already in 85/86 talk about that the Soviet hockey talent development had started to decline and I personally don't see much of a reason to believe that the level of Soviet/Russian hockey ever has come back to the level it had in the mid/late 70's and early/mid 80's.

 

[DannyGallivan]

One minor thing. Vasiliev also finished 2nd in the 78/79 Izvestia golden stick voting which worked as the stand in for the SPOTY that season. Still Fetisov's advantage over the rest of the Soviet defencemen is still massive which is perhaps even more evident when it comes to voting shares.

He is the greatest Soviet/Russian d-man of all time. Does not mean that he's the greatest Soviet hockey player of all time. His value may have been so apparent because, in the library of hockey "Great Soviet Defensemen" is a very thin book.

 

[Batis]

He is the greatest Soviet/Russian d-man of all time. Does not mean that he's the greatest Soviet hockey player of all time. His value may have been so apparent because, in the library of hockey "Great Soviet Defensemen" is a very thin book.

For what it is worth I rank Fetisov as the second greatest Soviet hockey player of all time (just behind Makarov) and I think that the question of what it is worth to be the by far greatest Soviet defenceman of all time is a valid one. But the thing is that the incredible amount of praise that Fetisov recieved from observers on both sides of the Atlantic does suggest that he belongs among the very greatest Soviet players of all time and perhaps even as the greatest (even if I would say that it is Makarov).