1993...Most Talented NHL Roster Ever?

[Rorschach]

Is the time of around 1993 the most elite talent in a single NHL roster in the history of the NHL?


1) Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux playing and still highly effective
Gretzky with his Conn Smythe worthy 1993 playoffs and Lemieux with a ridiculous GP 60, G 69, A 91, P 160, +/- +55

1a) So many teams with two #1 caliber centers on the same team...Lemieux/Francis, Yzerman/Federov, Sakic/Forsberg, Modano/Nieuwendyk, etc.


2) Goaltenders, all three GOATs in or heading into their primes: Patrick Roy, Martin Brodeur, Dominik Hasek

2a) Many other memorable goalies like Ed Belfour, Nikolai Khabibulin, Olaf Kolzig, Curtis Joseph, Mike Richter, Felix Potvin plus 80s holdovers


3) So much young, elite offensive talent coming into the league such as Eric Lindros, Jaromir Jagr, Pavel Bure, Teemu Selanne, Peter Forsberg, Sergei Federov, Brett Hull, Mats Sundin, Jeremy Roenick, Keith Tkachuk, etc.


4) Defensemen, oh boy, the insane amount of HOF and franchise defensemen in the NHL, especially the Americans (Leetch, Chelios, Hatcher bros, Gary Suter), Canadians (Scott Stevens, Scott Niedermayer, Al MacInnis, Gary Roberts, Chris Pronger, Ray Bourque, Paul Coffey, Rob Blake, etc.) and Vladimir Kostantinov, Sergei Zubov and some nobody named Nicklas Lidstrom


And I'm just going to mention the 5 Central Red Army elite veterans...Igor Larionov, Sergei Makarov, Vladisav Fetisov, Alexei Kasatonov, and Vladimir Krutov although he was on his last legs


I'm sure I've left out several HOFer players...
Maybe the one player who wasn't in the NHL yet but would be there soon was Paul Kariya...

Click to read more...

 

[Bruce Granville]

So many teams with two #1 caliber centers on the same team...Lemieux/Francis, Yzerman/Federov, Sakic/Forsberg, Modano/Nieuwendyk, etc.

Cap management off the charts…

But I agree with you. It was the best of times…

 

[Brodeur]

I got into hockey in the early 90's so a couple things I couldn't quite appreciate at the time:

- That big wave of Soviet/Czechoslovakian players getting to come over into the early 90's. Unfortunately those programs had a decade long setback soon after, so that talent pipeline kinda dried up as we headed into the 2000s.

Mogilny-Fedorov-Bure
Kamensky-Zhamnov-Kovalev
Kozlov-Larionov-Makarov
Zelepukin-Nemchinov-Borchevsky
Kvartalnov-Semak

Zhitnik-Zubov
Fetisov-Kasatonov
Malakhov-Mironov
Kravchuk-Yushkevich

That was almost like a Stanley Cup caliber team showing up over the course of a couple seasons.

- Obviously expansion watered things down a bit. 21 teams to start the decade, 26 by 1993-94, 30 in 2000-01. Imagine if the NHL contracted back down to 26 teams and how many awesome #2/3 centers there'd suddenly be.

- Goaltending has evolved since the early 90's. Technique has improved and the equipment is so much better. Somebody posted the 1997 Draft on YouTube and one interesting tidbit was the announcers mentioning that Mika Noronen might have the chance to be the best Finnish goalie ever in the NHL with the joke being that there hadn't really been one.

- Just from following the draft since 1995, I think the amount of high end talent has been pretty good in the last decade. These are guys are still in the middle of their careers so it's tough to compare them to guys that became HOFers.

 

[Strangle]

Not just hockey, everything was at its peak in 1993

 

[Frank Drebin]

NHL 94
Ronning/courtnall/bure
Unstoppable

 

[Breakers]

NHL 94 the game was peak video games

Absolute elite game

 

[bambamcam4ever]

Modano and Niewendyk weren't on the same team at the time

 

[super6646]

Modano and Niewendyk weren't on the same team at the time

Ya I was just about to mention that too. Pedantic I know, but nevertheless true.

 

[JPT]

NHL 94 the game was peak video games

Absolute elite game

As a kid I always wondered why players didn't just keep going from side to side behind the net in a continuously-reversing wrap around until the goalie got stuck outside of the crease.

 

[tarheelhockey]

Probably yes, though you do have to bear in mind that not all of those guys were actively playing like superstars at the time.

1993 represents the overlap of:

- late-peak athleticism of the late Baby Boomers (guys born in ‘63 were now 30)

- early-peak athleticism of the early X’ers (guys born in 1971 were now 22)

- the full opening up of the league to former Soviets and other Europeans

- during a period when the former eastern European pro leagues had largely imploded (so no KHL-style competition for talent)

- and this all took place just as the NHL was starting to expand for the first time in a generation so that the talent was mostly stacked onto 21 rosters which got to pad their stats on terrible expansion teams.

It was an absolutely perfect storm and yes, it was probably the NHL’s high water mark for pure concentrated talent on the ice every night.

 

[Voodoo Glow Skulls]

Again.

Mutant League Hockey.

Probably yes, though you do have to bear in mind that not all of those guys were actively playing like superstars at the time.

1993 represents the overlap of:

- late-peak athleticism of the late Baby Boomers (guys born in ‘63 were now 30)

- early-peak athleticism of the early X’ers (guys born in 1971 were now 22)

- the full opening up of the league to former Soviets and other Europeans

- during a period when the former eastern European pro leagues had largely imploded (so no KHL-style competition for talent)

- and this all took place just as the NHL was starting to expand for the first time in a generation so that the talent was mostly stacked onto 21 rosters which got to pad their stats on terrible expansion teams.

It was an absolutely perfect storm and yes, it was probably the NHL’s high water mark for pure concentrated talent on the ice every night.

Good analysis.

 

[Voodoo Glow Skulls]

I got into hockey in the early 90's so a couple things I couldn't quite appreciate at the time:

- That big wave of Soviet/Czechoslovakian players getting to come over into the early 90's. Unfortunately those programs had a decade long setback soon after, so that talent pipeline kinda dried up as we headed into the 2000s.

Mogilny-Fedorov-Bure
Kamensky-Zhamnov-Kovalev
Kozlov-Larionov-Makarov
Zelepukin-Nemchinov-Borchevsky
Kvartalnov-Semak

Zhitnik-Zubov
Fetisov-Kasatonov
Malakhov-Mironov
Kravchuk-Yushkevich

That was almost like a Stanley Cup caliber team showing up over the course of a couple seasons.

- Obviously expansion watered things down a bit. 21 teams to start the decade, 26 by 1993-94, 30 in 2000-01. Imagine if the NHL contracted back down to 26 teams and how many awesome #2/3 centers there'd suddenly be.

- Goaltending has evolved since the early 90's. Technique has improved and the equipment is so much better. Somebody posted the 1997 Draft on YouTube and one interesting tidbit was the announcers mentioning that Mika Noronen might have the chance to be the best Finnish goalie ever in the NHL with the joke being that there hadn't really been one.

- Just from following the draft since 1995, I think the amount of high end talent has been pretty good in the last decade. These are guys are still in the middle of their careers so it's tough to compare them to guys that became HOFers.

I can agree with this post.

 

[The Panther]

Is the time of around 1993 the most elite talent in a single NHL roster in the history of the NHL?


1) Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux playing and still highly effective
Gretzky with his Conn Smythe worthy 1993 playoffs and Lemieux with a ridiculous GP 60, G 69, A 91, P 160, +/- +55

1a) So many teams with two #1 caliber centers on the same team...Lemieux/Francis, Yzerman/Federov, Sakic/Forsberg, Modano/Nieuwendyk, etc.


2) Goaltenders, all three GOATs in or heading into their primes: Patrick Roy, Martin Brodeur, Dominik Hasek

2a) Many other memorable goalies like Ed Belfour, Nikolai Khabibulin, Olaf Kolzig, Curtis Joseph, Mike Richter, Felix Potvin plus 80s holdovers


3) So much young, elite offensive talent coming into the league such as Eric Lindros, Jaromir Jagr, Pavel Bure, Teemu Selanne, Peter Forsberg, Sergei Federov, Brett Hull, Mats Sundin, Jeremy Roenick, Keith Tkachuk, etc.


4) Defensemen, oh boy, the insane amount of HOF and franchise defensemen in the NHL, especially the Americans (Leetch, Chelios, Hatcher bros, Gary Suter), Canadians (Scott Stevens, Scott Niedermayer, Al MacInnis, Gary Roberts, Chris Pronger, Ray Bourque, Paul Coffey, Rob Blake, etc.) and Vladimir Kostantinov, Sergei Zubov and some nobody named Nicklas Lidstrom


And I'm just going to mention the 5 Central Red Army elite veterans...Igor Larionov, Sergei Makarov, Vladisav Fetisov, Alexei Kasatonov, and Vladimir Krutov although he was on his last legs


I'm sure I've left out several HOFer players...
Maybe the one player who wasn't in the NHL yet but would be there soon was Paul Kariya...

In short, yes.

I've always said the first half of the 1990s was the best / most-entertaining NHL product, and part of the reason was the incredible concentration of talented players who were able to demonstrate their talents on a regular basis (unlike, say, five-ten years later in the Dead Puck Era).

Factors that created this 'perfect storm' of talent to exist:

-- Rising salaries 1: 1980s' superstars were still superstars in the 1990s, largely because of the rise in salaries. (This largely didn't happen with 1970s guys in the 1980s.) When you're making $75,000, there's much less motivation to keep up your level of fitness and competitive edge than if you're suddenly making $2 million for the first time in your career. Bourque, Stevens, Messier, Gretzky, Hasek, Francis, Yzerman, MacInnis, etc. were all guys who'd started between 1979 and 1983, and they were all still superstar players in the mid-to-late-1990s.

-- Rising salaries 2: The NHL suddenly became a league of rich players around the end of the 80s and into the early-90s, which inevitably increased the general competition for jobs, notably from overseas. The quality and motivation of players from Sweden, Finland, Czech Republic, and Russia was higher and in greater volume than ever before.

-- Demographics: The late-stages of the Canadian (and also American, European) baby-boom of the post-war years saw many future hockey players born in the early/mid-1960s. These players were the core players around 1993. In the case of Canada, I would argue that players born in the 1960s and raised in the 1970s / early-80s are sort-of the last generation to be almost universally exposed to (obsessed with) hockey as a sport, thus maximizing the talent found within that demographic.

-- NHL not watered-down (yet). The League added three clubs to the 21 from 1991-1992, but around 24 was a very good and ideal number of teams, I think, for the existing talent in 1993. As has been noted upthread, we saw multiple superstars on several clubs in 1992-93, not just three or four clubs (out of 32) like today. The concentration of talent was simply higher.

-- Tail-end of the era when players, not coaches and strategies, decided games.

 

[Nogatco Rd]

Not just hockey, everything was at its peak in 1993

Last year before the internet, I’m sure that’s just a coincidence though

 

[Mandar]

Is the time of around 1993 the most elite talent in a single NHL roster in the history of the NHL?


1) Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux playing and still highly effective
Gretzky with his Conn Smythe worthy 1993 playoffs and Lemieux with a ridiculous GP 60, G 69, A 91, P 160, +/- +55

1a) So many teams with two #1 caliber centers on the same team...Lemieux/Francis, Yzerman/Federov, Sakic/Forsberg, Modano/Nieuwendyk, etc.


2) Goaltenders, all three GOATs in or heading into their primes: Patrick Roy, Martin Brodeur, Dominik Hasek

2a) Many other memorable goalies like Ed Belfour, Nikolai Khabibulin, Olaf Kolzig, Curtis Joseph, Mike Richter, Felix Potvin plus 80s holdovers


3) So much young, elite offensive talent coming into the league such as Eric Lindros, Jaromir Jagr, Pavel Bure, Teemu Selanne, Peter Forsberg, Sergei Federov, Brett Hull, Mats Sundin, Jeremy Roenick, Keith Tkachuk, etc.


4) Defensemen, oh boy, the insane amount of HOF and franchise defensemen in the NHL, especially the Americans (Leetch, Chelios, Hatcher bros, Gary Suter), Canadians (Scott Stevens, Scott Niedermayer, Al MacInnis, Gary Roberts, Chris Pronger, Ray Bourque, Paul Coffey, Rob Blake, etc.) and Vladimir Kostantinov, Sergei Zubov and some nobody named Nicklas Lidstrom


And I'm just going to mention the 5 Central Red Army elite veterans...Igor Larionov, Sergei Makarov, Vladisav Fetisov, Alexei Kasatonov, and Vladimir Krutov although he was on his last legs


I'm sure I've left out several HOFer players...
Maybe the one player who wasn't in the NHL yet but would be there soon was Paul Kariya...

Impressive for sure. Left Messier off your lists though

 

[fahad203]

Is the time of around 1993 the most elite talent in a single NHL roster in the history of the NHL?


1) Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux playing and still highly effective
Gretzky with his Conn Smythe worthy 1993 playoffs and Lemieux with a ridiculous GP 60, G 69, A 91, P 160, +/- +55

1a) So many teams with two #1 caliber centers on the same team...Lemieux/Francis, Yzerman/Federov, Sakic/Forsberg, Modano/Nieuwendyk, etc.


2) Goaltenders, all three GOATs in or heading into their primes: Patrick Roy, Martin Brodeur, Dominik Hasek

2a) Many other memorable goalies like Ed Belfour, Nikolai Khabibulin, Olaf Kolzig, Curtis Joseph, Mike Richter, Felix Potvin plus 80s holdovers


3) So much young, elite offensive talent coming into the league such as Eric Lindros, Jaromir Jagr, Pavel Bure, Teemu Selanne, Peter Forsberg, Sergei Federov, Brett Hull, Mats Sundin, Jeremy Roenick, Keith Tkachuk, etc.


4) Defensemen, oh boy, the insane amount of HOF and franchise defensemen in the NHL, especially the Americans (Leetch, Chelios, Hatcher bros, Gary Suter), Canadians (Scott Stevens, Scott Niedermayer, Al MacInnis, Gary Roberts, Chris Pronger, Ray Bourque, Paul Coffey, Rob Blake, etc.) and Vladimir Kostantinov, Sergei Zubov and some nobody named Nicklas Lidstrom


And I'm just going to mention the 5 Central Red Army elite veterans...Igor Larionov, Sergei Makarov, Vladisav Fetisov, Alexei Kasatonov, and Vladimir Krutov although he was on his last legs


I'm sure I've left out several HOFer players...
Maybe the one player who wasn't in the NHL yet but would be there soon was Paul Kariya...

Hockey really peaked around those times. You still had hitting, rough and tough hockey. With a blend of elite skills. Not to mention goalies were top notch in mid 90s

 

[Stephen]

It's hard to be objective about 1993 because I was 10 years old, getting into hockey for the first time and that whole era is so iconic and seared into my consciousness as a hockey fan. Every jersey was so perfect, every team had the right star power, there was hitting, glamorous scoring, acrobatic and elite goalending, etc. The pads and masks were all fresh and unique. The arenas were all so unique and gritty and blue collar. The whole league was less antiseptic and cookie cutter than it is now. So I agree with the OP in theory.

But to play the devil's advocate, that was also a 24 team league in 1992-93 and a 26 team league in 1993-94, and had just absorbed a ton of European talent that had recently been unlocked via end of the Cold War. If the NHL consolidated itself to to 24-26 teams overnight, wouldn't this era suddenly feel a lot more vital? Maybe we have to wait 30 years and ask someone who was 10 in 2024 for their perspective.

 

[Herby]

The NHL was popular at this time. In three consecutive years the three largest media markets in the USA all had finals runs, with the Rangers winning it in 94. NHL94 was a popular video game, the product of the league was great with a nice mix of skill and toughness.

The league just expanded too fast and the game shifted to a terrible defense first style for over a decade, and has still never returned completely, because defense and system can still produce positive results over skill and talent. The physicality, especially the fighting, which helped make the sport popular is gone forever.

 

[Regal]

I know some people will say it’s nostalgia and focus on population numbers today but I think @tarheelhockey and @The Panther make some great points that I agree with. There’s a lot more factors to consider than just population and I think the specialization and cost of the sport has made it less accessible. I think those early 90s years were pretty much a peak level of talent.

 

[tarheelhockey]

I know some people will say it’s nostalgia and focus on population numbers today but I think @tarheelhockey and @The Panther make some great points that I agree with. There’s a lot more factors to consider than just population and I think the specialization and cost of the sport has made it less accessible. I think those early 90s years were pretty much a peak level of talent.

Even bringing population into it — people seriously underestimate how many more Canadian children played hockey during the 1960s and 1970s. That was the childhood/teenagerhood of the Boomers, when there were a lot more native-born Canadian children running around than there are today. Then factor in that kids of that era were much more inclined to play sports in the first place, and that hockey was miles ahead of anything else as the sport of choice in that era, and that high-end hockey was actually accessible to non-wealthy families.

And the same dynamics were going on in Russia.

Yes the sport has expanded in the USA and a few other places during the current era, but at best that is only a matter of offsetting the decline of the Canadian and Soviet superpowers. And that’s not even getting into having the talent spread across 50% more roster spots.

Today’s NHL is more technically skilled, but arguably less populated with pure natural talent than it was 30 years ago. It’s a simple matter of roster spots per capita.

 

[bleedgreen]

It was by far the most fun I’ve had as a fan. All the way through the playoffs, amazing performances by a ridiculous wealth of talent. We haven’t seen anything like it since and it’s hard to imagine it happening again.

Defense hadn’t caught up to the overload of offensive talent. The Russian invasion played a part for sure. Feds, Bure, Mogilny, Zhamnov, Kovalev….

Euros in general with Jagr, Selanne, Bondra, Sundin…etc.

 

[MoneyManny]

I was 8 years old watching the Habs win the Stanley cup against Gretzky's Kings bonding with my dad and wearing my Guy Carbonneau sweater... Yeah, 93 was definitely peak hockey.

 

[JianYang]

1993 was also the year that they were transitioning from ziegler to bettman, I think. At least, I remember bettman delivered the cup in 1993 at the Montreal forum. This was the first time I recall bettman being loudly boo'd... a tradition that stands today.

It was also the final year of the adams/smythe/norris/Patrick divisions. Also the final year of the Campbell and Wales conferences.

I agree, 1993 was just an amazing time to be a hockey fan. In retrospect, I think the nhl lost some of its charm permanently after this season. It just began feeling more corporate.

 

[GMR]

Yes for the reasons stated above.

Also, each team carried two or three enforcers who were immensely popular with the fans. The PIM totals from those years are hard to fathom today.

 

[Rorschach]

Yes for the reasons stated above.

Also, each team carried two or three enforcers who were immensely popular with the fans. The PIM totals from those years are hard to fathom today.

Good point, there were still some amazing tough guys with talent. Rick Tocchet comes to mind but there are others.