Sturminator
Love is a duel
When ATD members compare players, they are comparing careers and impact, correct? There is absolutely no way anyone from the 30's to maybe 60's is BETTER than Ovie, yeah I haven't seen them play, but it's plain physics.
You have it exactly. There is no accepted formula, but we try to compare a player to the best players in the world at the time and then compare that group of players against the whole continuum of hockey history. It's not an exact science, and intelligent minds may disagree. Some eras seem stronger and some seem weaker. I, for example, take a pretty sharp knife to scoring finishes in the 40-41 to 45-46 timeframe simply because the league was so weak during that period. I also see a lot of weakness in the league outside of Montreal in the late 50's, for example, and the early 70's look a little soft. The more knowledge you have of the whole of hockey history, the more specific you can be in weighing a player's accomplishments vs. "the field" - that is, relative to the big picture.
I also agree with BraveCanadian. I can't understand a player's "greatness" if I haven't seen him play. I'm too young to remember watching Gretz and Lemieux play, so I stay away from any arguments about those two. I guess all we have is hearsay, statistics (which can be deceiving) and quotes. For the record, the "best" player I've seen play is Crosby, and Jagr with Rangers those first couple of years was great.
Hold tight. Through the wonders of modern technology, we now have access to a great number of first-hand accounts of game action from 100+ years ago through the present. Seriously, there is enough information available on the internet to render even The Trail of the Stanley Cup obsolete. ATD 2011 may well be a watershed event in hockey scholarship, not only on these boards, but in general.