in the alphabetical first name order that AoS posted them in the OP:
kirk mclean: held all the franchise records until luongo broke them. still the best, or at worst 1a, playoff goalie in franchise history. one elite season, one very very good but let's be real sub-elite season (that '89 vezina nom is a joke; he finished 6th in AST voting), bunch of very good seasons. one ridiculous playoff run. pretty sure he was the first canuck to seriously factor in hart voting, in '92.
matthias ohlund: as i said in the last thread--
i think he has a three year peak as a fringe top ten d-man in the game, and a top five defensive guy in a very defensive era. i don't think lumme was ever close to top ten or top five in any category for d-men. ohlund is the one guy where he's not getting penalized for his team's playoff failures; naslund, bertuzzi, cooke, jovanovski, i look at all those guys and ask: "what the hell did you ever do that was worth remembering?" i'm not sure why ohlund gets a pass from me, but my gut says he deserves that pass, relative to lumme's and hamhuis's contributions to finals runs.
to that i'll add: of all players from that era, including old man linden, artem chubarov, and the three all-stars, seeing that viking patrolling the blue line and just manhandling guys like clockwork is by far what i miss most. i loved peak ohlund so much that i even stopped hoping he'd re-find the offensive game that we saw glimpses of pre-eye injury; it no longer even mattered to me he was so good at what he did.
ryan kesler: incredible defender, borderline elite scorer given his place in the lineup, fringe top ten player at his position at his peak, many years of service, pushed the play, singlehandedly won a playoff round. despite how he left, unquestionably a heart and soul player who bled much blood for this uniform.
stan smyl: almost certainly #1 for me, though i reserve the right for arguments to change my mind. length of tenure, importance of contributions, intangibles; arguably all four other guys here were more elite than him, but other than ohlund none of them contributed for as long. add to that his contributions to team culture, ties to the community, etc., and he gets the boost from me that linden did in round 1.
thomas gradin: very good, steady contributor but never elite; led the team in scoring when they made it to the finals; peak years were probably miscast as a 1st line center when he would have been an elite 2nd line center; starting to think i've overrated him: i always thought of him as our thomas steen, but steen was probably significantly better defensively and had much greater longevity (more on gradin reevaluation below)
the only guy i can see with any possible outside shot at cracking that top five is burrows, but realistically he's #6 at best.
it's a tough round. as i said, i'm coming into this with steamer as the heavy favourite for #1. a lot of that is probably sentimental, but (i'm only speaking for myself here) i think a lot of this project rests on sentimentality and rightfully so.
but there are very good arguments for these five guys to go in almost any order. at their best, no one was better than captain kirk. with all due respect to beast mode kesler, if we count '92 regular season and/or '94 playoffs mclean as his peaks, mclean > kesler, ainec.
objectively, ohlund and smyl have similar length tenures as very good players, probably ridiculously underrated outside of vancouver, and for mostly undercompetitive teams. steamer has the obvious intangibles, but matty was a rock. but that said, it seems like we have adjust for era when we determine players' longevity. my gut tells me there's a huge difference between smyl's 13 seasons (10 good ones) and ohlund's 11 seasons (all good ones). it's not just the 100 extra games smyl played, which is basically just his rookie season and post-prime games anyway; it's that 800 games in the 80s is way more impressive than 800 games in the 2000s. in the same way that hitting 1,000 games was a huge accomplishment until the early 90s, but now it's a gold watch. so even if we can eyeball their resumes and say "roughly equal years of quality service," i don't think smyl's and ohlund's tenures are roughly equal at all.
and on that note, the toughest thing in this round is kesler vs. gradin. check this out:
name | games | total goals |total assists | total points
Thomas Gradin | 613 | 197 | 353 | 550
Ryan Kesler | 655 | 182 | 211 | 393
name | games | adjusted goals | adjusted assists | adjusted points
Thomas Gradin | 613 | 155 | 280 | 435
Ryan Kesler | 655 | 201 | 229 | 430
it surprises me that kesler played half a season more than gradin did, but looking at their adjusted stats (an inexact science, obviously, but still), you'd have to think that kesler's all-world defensive game puts him easily ahead of gradin right? but then the sticky wicket of are gradin's 600 1980s games more impressive or do they constitute a longer tenure here than kesler's 600 millennial games?
and then furthermore, as i brought up last time, we have the difficulty of looking at their records objectively and wondering whether gradin and smyl should really be equals.
which is all to say, again, that those five guys could go in any order.
