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All-time hitters

Hippasus

Hippasus

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Feb 17, 2008
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How do Eddie Shore, Gordie Howe, Scott Stevens, Ulf Samuelsson, Darius Kasparaitis, Zdeno Chara, Niklas Kronwall, or Cal Clutterbuck figure in terms of all-time hitters? Are there others?

Edit: Perhaps Broad Street Bullies.
 
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Hitters, as in body checkers?

Eric Lindros, Cam Neely, Bryan Marchment, Rich Pilon, Rick Tocchet, Vladimir Konstantinov, Wendel Clark...
 
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Boxscore said:
Hitters, as in body checkers?

Eric Lindros, Cam Neely, Bryan Marchment, Rich Pilon, Rick Tocchet, Vladimir Konstantinov, Wendel Clark...
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Right, I'm not talking about fighting.

Good suggestion on Konstantinov, I was just about to add him to my list. Maybe Matt Martin and Alex Ovechkin as well.
 
Larry Robinson, Denis Potvin, Dion Phaneuf in the first part of his career was pretty much unanimously known as a heavy hitter.

Bob Baun, Tim Horton come to mind too.
 
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Mark Tinordi and Steve Chiasson were big hitters who haven't been mentioned. Ed Jovanovski was another especially early in his career.
 
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Just an example. Although, with the hitter falling, he also took himself out of the play, but still less than the other guy.



EDIT: Actually Ruutu got up quicker. Still, plays like that can change the game for the hitter's team.
 
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Quantity? Quality? Within the rules (as they were enforced at the time)?

Kiefer Sherwood just set the record for most hits (since hits have been tracked), but he wasn't out there crushing guys by any stretch of the imagination.
Raffi Torres was a cannonball but could often go over the line.
Stevens' destroyed guys and never got suspended for his hits.

A couple of guys I'd add would be Bob and Barclay Plager as well as Hilliard Graves who were all very active hit-wise and were masters of the hipcheck.
 
David Bruce Banner said:
Quantity? Quality? Within the rules (as they were enforced at the time)?

Kiefer Sherwood just set the record for most hits (since hits have been tracked), but he wasn't out there crushing guys by any stretch of the imagination.
Raffi Torres was a cannonball but could often go over the line.
Stevens' destroyed guys and never got suspended for his hits.

A couple of guys I'd add would be Bob and Barclay Plager as well as Hilliard Graves who were all very active hit-wise and were masters of the hipcheck.
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Good questions. I didn't really think about it, but probably should have. I'd say all of the above in terms of what I bolded from your post. Quality and strategic hitting should be significant factors. I think we should indeed judge relative to the context of the league at the time, and within the given rules at the time. Quantity is interesting, but perhaps not as significant as the other factors you mentioned.
 
In Konstantinov highlight, a lot of them were really good at being "clean", not touching the head first but still like many of those today would cause a whistle with the team trying to respond right away...
 
Some guys not mentioned:
Brooks Orpik
Marcel Pronovost
Luke Richardson
Jerry Korab
Bill Barilko
Jeff Beukeboom

My Best-Carey
 
Lucic is up there. He made countless defensemen fumble puck recoveries in the corners knowing he was bearing down and going to plaster them.

his 2013 playoff run may have been the peak of it:

 
Add young Michael Peca, nicknamed Captain Crunch, for his open-ice hits on head-down puck carriers.

He took out Selanne, Lindros, multiple others.





He won multiple Selke for making a lot of great checks on pu k carriers, some of them case studies in "keep your head up; a hit is coming".
 
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vikash1987 said:
I’m a bit biased, but I regard Scott Stevens as the greatest open-ice hitter of all-time, both in terms of physical, bodily impact and in terms of the impact or those hits on entire playoff series
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Yeah, Stevens knew the value of knocking out the top guys on the opposition in the playoffs. He was a machine in 2001 laying out forward after forward with jarring hits. No point punishing too severely in the regular season but if you can take a guy out of the lineup in the playoffs it can dramatically affect a series going forward and he knew that. Most of the big Stevens signature hits came in the playoffs.

I think he hit a Canes player with, like, fifteen seconds left in a blowout game in the first round of that year and took him out of the rest of the best-of-seven. I think he'd already drilled Ron Francis who barely staggered to the bench and by the end of the series Carolina's forward core were just happy to come out alive. They were shell shocked.

My Best-Carey
 
VanIslander said:


He won multiple Selke for making a lot of great checks on pu k carriers, some of them case studies in "keep your head up; a hit is coming".
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at first i was like, that’s gotta be rob zamuner right?

but then i freeze framed it and it’s actually someone named steve martins, who wore #16 on the senators the first of two years zamuner was on the team. i can’t make out what the announcer is saying, but zamuner must have done something (“again”) somewhere else on the ice. probably received the drop pass several mississippis before peca murders martins.
 
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frisco said:
Yeah, Stevens knew the value of knocking out the top guys on the opposition in the playoffs. He was a machine in 2001 laying out forward after forward with jarring hits. No point punishing too severely in the regular season but if you can take a guy out of the lineup in the playoffs it can dramatically affect a series going forward and he knew that. Most of the big Stevens signature hits came in the playoffs.

I think he hit a Canes player with, like, fifteen seconds left in a blowout game in the first round of that year and took him out of the rest of the best-of-seven. I think he'd already drilled Ron Francis who barely staggered to the bench and by the end of the series Carolina's forward core were just happy to come out alive. They were shell shocked.

My Best-Carey
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Shane Willis, Ron Francis, and Sami Kapanen all received punishing hits from Stevens during that Devils-Hurricanes series in 2001. Those hits, i.e. the Stevens factor, really defined that series.
 
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