'Weak' eras in NHL history

[The Panther]

From the mid 1970s thru 1979 the NHL had quality HHOF goalies. Slowly Giacomin, Dryden, Parent, Cheevers etc retired or were injured - this would include John Davidson. Only one HHOF goalie surfaced - Grant Fuhr.

I'm not really buying the argument that because 4 or 5 goalies retired, the overall NHL quality of play dropped. Also, John Davidson in 1980-81 had an .832 save percentage.

The fact remains there were 275 fewer pro-hockey jobs available in the autumn of 1979 than there had been in the spring of 1976, and there were more European players coming available. Goaltending may indeed have gone through a weaker period in the early-80s, but I can't accept the argument that the overall game was at a lower level than in mid to late-WHA days.

 

[Canadiens1958]

I'm not really buying the argument that because 4 or 5 goalies retired, the overall NHL quality of play dropped. Also, John Davidson in 1980-81 had an .832 save percentage.

The fact remains there were 275 fewer pro-hockey jobs available in the autumn of 1979 than there had been in the spring of 1976, and there were more European players coming available. Goaltending may indeed have gone through a weaker period in the early-80s, but I can't accept the argument that the overall game was at a lower level than in mid to late-WHA days.

Davidson was playing thru an injury. Participated in only 10 games. Other than a few futile attempts his career ended:

John Davidson Stats | Hockey-Reference.com

Players attrition from the bottom up and enter the league from the bottom-up:

Gaetan Duchesne Stats | Hockey-Reference.com

Washington' 8th round pick was playing in the NHL in the fall of 1981. While the Canadiens were developing future captains and HHOFers in the AHL:

Nova Scotia Voyageurs 1981-82 roster and scoring statistics at hockeydb.com

Never a question of total available jobs, rather it is a question of eligible talent. Certain teams, mainly late expansion teams KC/Colorado etc lacked depth.

 

[tarheelhockey]

Good effort.

However parity and quality are not synonyms.

Plus coaching, management and scouting have to be considered.

The premature departure of junior coaches and management impacted the development of junior players.Prime example, not quite ready Gary Green leaving the champion Peterborough Petes to coach the Capitals.

You're right that parity and quality are two different things, and not necessarily connected. I think in the case of the WHA era, though, we have a pretty compelling reason to believe that the extreme lack of parity in the league actually was connected to a lack of talent depth -- that compelling reason being a jarring expansion to from 6 to 32 "major league" teams in under a decade.

Even by today's standards, the 32nd best team in pro hockey is a hopelessly substandard minor league squad. Imagine what it would look like if we deleted all European players, and stacked most of the top NHL talent into a single divison. That lower bracket of teams would be in for a serious pounding, as experienced by the Caps/Rockies/Seals/Stars tier during the mid-70s. I've always thought of them as "bad NHL teams", so maybe just for me personally it's revelatory to think of them as "almost literally minor league teams that should never have been on NHL ice".

You make a good point about coaching and management. Executive talent was concentrated in just a few pipelines (not six... more like three) to such an extent that the expansion front office directories look like amateur hour compared to the top teams. Imagine being a Habs or Leafs exec and dropping in for an unannounced visit at the Seals or Caps front office! The sheer lack of infrastructure and culture in those organizations, from top to bottom, must have been truly daunting. Seems to me it took about 20 years before the futility stopped being self-perpetuating in some of those orgs.

 

[SealsFan]

As much as I love the era of hockey of my youth and as much as I love bad teams, I'd have to say the 70's were weak in the context of the gap between top and bottom tier teams was VERY wide, perhaps the widest it had been since the WW2 years (just track the scores of some of those Ranger teams). If you catch some videos of lower-tier 70's teams, they're skating around like chickens with their heads cut off.

Even though the expansion teams of the 90's posted some pretty awful W-L-T records, there isn't the legend and lore surrounding those clubs as far as stories of their ineptitude the way there is with the Seals, Capitals, Scouts, Rockies, etc.

While I don't follow the modern game much my perception is that the lower-tier teams are better coached, better conditioned and better disciplined than bad teams of previous eras; it's more a case of an inevitable talent/skills gap when you have 31 teams...

 

[TheEye]

We all know that the 50's with the emergence of the Montreal Canadiens franchise led by Beliveau & co was a really strong era, as was the first half of the 90's. But what eras do you consider to be distinctly poor in the history of the league?

The early 00's always strike me as a real down-period for the NHL. Theodore winning the Hart? Naslund being perhaps the prime scorer? No offense to them, but it isn't exactly guys who register all that much in history.

Nick Hansen, there was recently a fervent discussion on this in a related thread. Rather than inviting everyone to rehash these same arguments ad nauseam, it may be beneficial to parse this thread first:

The Misunderstood O6 era

With that noted, I think JackSlater pretty much summed it up. I'd additionally slot the 80's era in as the third weakest period, after the WWII era and the 1970s.

 

[Randy Marsh]

2002-2004 was probably the weakest stretch in modern NHL history. Slow, low-scoring games with a lack of top-end talent.

Surprising because they were bookended by big offensive seasons in 2001 and 2006.

 

[quoipourquoi]

2002-2004 was probably the weakest stretch in modern NHL history. Slow, low-scoring games with a lack of top-end talent.

Surprising because they were bookended by big offensive seasons in 2001 and 2006.

I wouldn’t say the league lacked top-end talent in the three-season window of 2002-2004, so much as it was a case of many of the early-1970s-born offensive players who would have been carrying the ball were breaking down under the style of hockey that was played leading into the early-2000s (HOFers Lindros, Bure, Forsberg, Selanne, and Kariya) while the late-1970s and early-1980s-born players who would have filled in the gaps had some spotty development (future HOFers Thornton, Iginla, St. Louis, as well as Alfredsson, Lecavalier, and the Sedins).

A lot of factory goaltending at the time had it where a shot was less likely to generate a goal than any time since the 1960s - but it’s also a response to the increased star power of the position and the greater prominence of goaltending-specific coaching. There were fewer standouts but the talent level as a whole had increased from the 1990s. On this point alone, I think the early-2000s are somewhat unfairly judged.

Probably enough 40-year-old Defensemen getting Norris nominations to say that it was indeed a lull there.

 

[GlitchMarner]

The 70s (a lot if not all of the decade), the early 80s and the early 00s are weaker periods in NHL history. .

Furthermore, I think the mid 2010s weren't very exciting in terms of the scoring race and big seasons from star players.

 

[tony d]

The period between 2001-2004 was pretty weak.

 

[PurpleMouse]

It depends on if you're talking about entertainment value or quality of play value.

Both are actually hard to gauge- entertainment is completely subjective, and quality is even somewhat subjective because part of someone looking good is someone else looking bad. If you don't have any standout players, is it because you don't have any standout talent or is it because the bottom talent is also good?

Objectively, the 70s would have to be far and away the weakest "per team" quality: basically the same amount of teams as now but with far, far, far, far, far, less available players. But even that it depends on how you measure the quality, if you're looking at the average or the actual teams. It's possible that things were so front loaded that the best teams of the 70s would still be great in the 60s, 80s, or even today if given time to adjust. But it probably isn't debatable that bad teams of that era would get absolutely demolished in any era after, and possibly before too even with with modern advancements.

 

[Jets4Life]

At the beginning of the 1975-76 season, there were 32 pro teams in North America, and No Russians, precious few Scandinavians, and no Eastern Europeans. Hockey was not nearly as popular in the USA either.

Total there is a greater talent pool. Only 45% of the NHL are from Canada, as opposed to nearly 95% in the early 70s.