A truly bizarre article on Niedermayer

[Regal]

Agree with everything else you wrote, except this.

As much as Niedermayer is over-rated, Blake is even more so.

Blake benefitted tremendously from playing his entire career on the West Coast in non-traditional hockey markets. Almost all of his games were played with the majority of the influential hockey media (and most fans) already in bed.

See him once or twice a season, and you're impressed by the power in his game, his big shot, and his awesome ass-checks. See him play every night, and you start to notice how little hockey sense he had in his own zone, how poorly he timed many of his hits, and how generally average defensively he was.

Norstrom in LA and Foote in Colorado were the guys doing the dirty work and getting all the tough matchups. As a Canuck fan, I loved seeing the WCE on the ice against Blake instead of Foote. Blake was an offensive defender who hit hard, and who everyone assumed was far better than he was because people associate hitting people with good defensive play.

Only in his last couple years in SJ, when his skills were diminishing, did he finally learn to play within himself and limit his mistakes.

And yeah, his Norris was one of the most phony award wins of all time. Lidstrom and Numminen should both have lapped him in voting that year.

Definitely disagree with that. In Blake's time with Colorado I was always impressed by how good he was both offensively and defensively, and remember thinking I wished the Canucks could have that type of number 1 that they clearly didn't have in Jovo.


Anyway, I think too much is being made of the article. He's not saying that he's better than Stevens or Pronger, just that their physicality made them stand out more. I don't know if I agree that he himself was underappreciated throughout his career, but his style of play definitely was prior to the full season lockout, whereas the majority of the top dmen these days play a similar style (the Nieds we saw after 2002). It does make one wonder if he could have reached his prime much sooner if he started his career in this era.