Why doesn’t Yzerman get the same benefit of the doubt that some other all-time greats get when it comes to injuries? There a lot of talk about how much greater some players would have been if their careers were not cut short by injury or if they had been healthy for their entire career. Yzerman clearly does not this same treatment on this board when ranking the best players of all time. I think it is completely overlooked that he struggled with injuries the majority of his career since the time he wrecked his knee on the goalpost against buffalo.
This is not talked about though; it is like people think he was healthy from the time that happened till his epic performance in the 2002 playoffs. We hear about Mario’s back, Bure and Orr’s knees, Forsberg’s maladies etc., etc. But, through the 90s Yzerman struggled with injuries, except he played through them and remained a ppg+ player and become very good on defense. Is it overlooked because he played and didn’t miss huge time in the 90’s? Because, they didn’t cut his career short?
I bring this up because I cannot understand how he is so underrated all time. Him being ranked 36th on this forum just boggles my mind. He is ranked 6th ALL TIME in points and has every excuse every other player has had for not having more; bad linemates at his offensive peak pre-injuries, injuries, becoming a dominate defensive player, sacrificing for the team to win, and missing games due to work stoppages.
So tell me, why is he ranked so low? Because he does not have trophy case of individual awards playing behind Wayne and Mario? Because he was not lucky enough to have a dominate team early on like Crosby has had for instant success? The dude was just flat out dominant in anything he chose and was a tremendous leader and the cornerstone of a franchise that went from completely inept to being contenders year in and year out.
Yes, I am I am a huge Yzerman fan and yeah he has been talked about a lot here. I read tons of the views on him by posters in this forum and it doesn’t make sense he is ranked so low.
Yes Yzerman is rated low here and like you said i think it is due a lot to the fact that his awards voting and scoring placements arent as high as other (inferior) players. I personally think that his awards voting and scoring placements are not representative of his stature as a player due to various contextual considerations but one of the dominant paradigms here seems to be a ranking based on relative dominance of era. Unfortunately for Yzerman the era of the late 80s early 90s was the most competitive in terms of offensive forwards. Add to that considerations of injuries and coaching and team composition and team performance which hurt Yzerman's production and prominence at the time.
In 88 Yzerman was a strong Hart Trophy candidate against Lemieux and Gretzky then he got hurt. In 89 Yzerman was actually the favorite for the Hart Trophy over Lemieux and Gretzky according to an informal poll of 20ish of the voters in March but then the Wings ended the season on a big skid and dropped in the league standings. In 90 seems that the three best players in the league were all disqualified from even placing high in Hart Trophy voting due in large part to poor team performance. In 91 and 92 Yzerman's ice time (and thus scoring) dropped a lot because Murray came in with a more team oriented philosophy and Fedorov and Carson were also first line centers on the same team. When you have to share your ice time (and wingers) your numbers are bound to drop (by the way this especially hurt Carson and i dont think enough attention has been given to the situation in Detroit for his career fizzling out). In 93 before Carson was traded Yzerman was scoring at a similar rate as the previous 2 seasons. As soon as Carson left Yzerman's scoring exploded.
The defense thing is another reason. It is almost as if Yzerman is being penalized for becoming so good defensively in his later career as people start anachronistically foiling late Yzerman with an early Yzerman that was bad defensively. Not only is this exagerrated to the point of being incorrect (look at what Demers and Murray had to say about Yzerman's defense before Bowman and what Yzerman himself says:
"I always considered myself a decent two-way player," he said. "It's just that I never got noticed about playing defense until I stopped scoring.") but it is also highly oversimplistic. Look at changing league trends, changing team needs, changes in coaching, changing supporting cast, changes in Yzerman's abilities and limitations due to age and injuries, and perhaps most importantly changes in perception for a good explanation. Just because a player makes changes in his game and focuses on defense later in his career doesnt mean he was some kind of defensive liability before that.
Still outside of hfboards Yzerman is ranked high (as i think he should be). For example just recently he was named the 3rd best center of the modern era by Hockey Night in Canada's
Best of the Best. The same media people who didnt give Yzerman enough credit during the mid 90s seem to hold him in extremely high esteem now not to mention players, coaches, managers, scouts, fans.
You do make a good point about Yzerman's injuries and his ranking though. People who think he recovered from his injury in 88 because of his 89 season dont know that Yzerman had that knee bother him throughout that season. That 88 knee injury was a career threatening one and it very likely adversely affected his career. That 155 point season may have not even been the true peak of Yzerman without that injury.
This site does a good job of listing a lot of Yzerman's injuries throughout his career. It isnt complete but it really shows how many problems he had with that right knee beginning with his rookie season.
One thing that Yzerman is criticized for is his lack of playoff production and success in the early and mid 90s but people forget that he was injured one way or another
every single year.
- 91: Yzerman scores 3 goals and 6 points in first 3 games against the Blues getting the Wings off to a series lead but hurts his knee in game 3. He still plays in the next 4 games but is pointless and the Blues come back to win in 7.
- 92: Yzerman hurts his rib early in the series against Minnesota but doesnt miss a game though he only gets 3 goals and 8 points in 11 games that postseason.
- 93: Yzerman has 3 goals and 5 points in the first 2 games against the Leafs and the Wings win both games but then hurts his wrist in game 3. He only gets 1 goal and 2 points for the remainder of the series and the Leafs win in 7.
- 94: Yzerman misses the first 4 games against the Sharks which is split 2 games each and because of this he comes back early for the last 3 games but only scores 1 goal and 4 points as the Wings lose in 7. If Yzerman wasnt hurt and played the entire series it seems unlikely that the Sharks would win. There would go the biggest playoff disappointment and biggest reason for the choker label for Yzerman and the Wings.
- 95: Yzerman scores 3 goals and 11 points in his first 9 games before hurting his knee in game 4 against the Sharks. He has arthroscopic surgery and quickly comes back in game 4 against the Blackhawks but only scores 1 goal and 2 points in his last 6 games.
- 96: Yzerman scores 8 goals and 17 points in 13 games in the first 2 series basically carrying the seriously underachieving Wings over the Blues to the conference finals. Gets hurt in game 1 against the Avs (injury might have its origin in the OT goal celebration) and misses game 2. Comes back hurt for the next 4 games but doesnt score a goal and only gets 3 points in the series as the Wings get eliminated.
Yeah people play and produce through injuries in the playoffs. Obviously Yzerman did both. But it is wrong to expect
full production from an injured Yzerman and it is wrong to just look at the stats and team results without looking at context and put the choker label on him. Who knows though maybe Yzerman would be ranked higher in the minds of some if he sat out those games that he was hurt and thus maintained a much better scoring rate?
Yzerman was cut from team canada because keenan didnt consider him as a two hundred foot player.
Is this just conjecture? Because it doesnt hold up to fact checking. First of all Yzerman wasnt cut from Team Canada in 91 he was on the taxi squad and decided to leave. Second the reason that Keenan
actually gave for not giving Yzerman a regular spot was that he had a bad training camp and not anything about defense. Now Yzerman was quite rightly pissed off about this for a couple of reasons. First Alan Eagleson had earlier promised Yzerman a spot on the team and he turned out to be lying. Second Keenan reason of having a bad camp wasnt a uniform standard because Messier didnt even participate in camp and got a spot on the team. I speculate that Keenan just didnt like Yzerman very much. Sather picked Yzerman for Team Canada coming off his rookie year in 84 and let him play in 4 games with tonsillitis before scratching him. Yzerman also dominated the 89 and 90 World Championships. This Canada Cup talk is really one of the poorest cases against Yzerman...
That's a big factor, sure. When you look at his prime in the late-eighties and early-nineties, he's almost unanimously slated sixth behind Gretzky, Lemieux, Messier, Roy, and Bourque. Added to that, his career fell close enough to those of Hasek, Jagr, Sakic, and Lidstrom that the majority has him behind them as well, making him somewhere around the 10th best since 1984.
Except with regards to the late 80s part at least Yzerman was actually unanimously considered better (and for many not just better but in a different class) than every player in the league except for Lemieux and Gretzky and he was considered by some to be in the same league as Lemieux and Gretzky... I may be unaware of something but nobody seems to have considered Messier or Bourque or Roy as such.
True that on hfboards Yzerman seems to be be widely considered after all of those guys you listed but im pretty sure thats not the case in the wider hockey following world where he is widely considered better than most if not all of the listed. Lidstrom ranking over Yzerman on here is the one that most surprises me.
imo, it is hard to argue yzerman had a better peak.
jagr scored about as much in more difficult circumstances and with less TOI. he also controlled play in a way yzerman could not.
If you are talking about a more extended prime of 6+ years then you can say Jagr scored about as much than Yzerman but in his peak in the late 80s Yzerman scored significantly more. Jagr did maintain his offense for longer than Yzerman did (due especially to injuries and coaching) but Yzerman at his best was better offensively than Jagr at his best.
Yes Jagr had to face better goaltending and stronger team D (though id argue that Jagr was built for the dead puck era as his strength made the clogged ice much less of an obstacle than it was for smaller and weaker players (like Kariya or even Selanne) - the dead puck era affected other players negatively much more than Jagr) and these circumstances do even up the gap quite a bit. However due to teams playing more structured defensive systems the shadows that Yzerman had to deal with became less and less of a factor. Also defensive demands on Yzerman were clearly greater than on Jagr.
Ice time is a very strange argument in Jagr's favor of being more offensively productive. First of all the only time Yzerman got significantly more ice time than Jagr ever did was under Demers when he got around 30 minutes. As soon as Murray came in (and Fedorov and Carson) Yzerman's ice time was cut by drastically. Yzerman also played roles that Jagr didnt play (defensively) especially in penalty killing where a big chunk of the extra ice time went. Yzerman's extra ice time probably burned him out more than confer any advantage offensively. This is all notwithstanding the change from a long shift game to short shift game and the changed nature of play in general.
