Another thing on the defensive value of Apps, or any other centres.
Some centres, most famously Wayne Gretzky, had a famous linemate who "played the centre's defensive role", and there are two ways you could interpret this:
- centres should be the best defensive player on their line, and if a centre's defensive value is low enough, you need someone to fill the gaps and bring up the line overall. (I think this one's wrong, but unfortunately common in the ATD)
- centres have a specific set of defensive tasks that they're usually responsible for (marking the opposing centre, being the second guy into corner battles while the weak side D protects the house), and that if it benefits a Gretzky to play up high like a winger, then someone else has to do that.
Given where I stand on those two interpretations, finding a defensive winger for most centres who played at any time period where the centre had this role, is only important if you can prove this player was specifically used that way. If you have a centre who was simply subpar defensively - soft in corner battles, tended to forget where his man was, didn't move his feet - then you just play him with normal wingers and eat the weakness. Find another centre to take the important faceoffs, because putting Jari Kurri on his wing is not going to help you much here. In the case of a player like Apps where there just isn't much about his defense, it seems more likely to me that he carried out the duties of his position in an adequate fashion.
Now, the trickier question is when "the duties of the centre" took shape. I know Frank Boucher, who preceded and overlapped with Apps, was quite influential in the position. Then there's the offensive zone forward pass, which arrived in its current form partway through Boucher's career but 7 years ahead of Apps, plenty of time for people to figure out how to play against it. Maybe an even more important part of the puzzle is the development of the "point man" role, where players like the Bentley brothers would create offense from high in the zone (impossible without the forward pass), which I'd expect necessitated further division of labour and possibly laid the foundations for the modern role of "defensive winger" - the point pressure and counterattack type, as opposed to a substitute centre like Kurri. The Bentleys are several years behind Apps but overlapped for 7 years.
So if we thought the reality Gretzky and Kurri operated in took shape late in the Bentley's career, then what do we do with Apps? Is he not expected to play "the role of centre", or did he fulfill his own duties well enough (pending research from tinyzombies) to be a basically average centre who hands off some of the harder shifts to Trottier?
