That's the thing, what Karlssons was able to do with his teams was insane, if not impossible. Look at guy like McDavid struggling to carry his team and he has Draistal with him. Look at how much Doughty and Keith dropped as soon as their teams lost talent/depth.
A lot of those Senators teams were basement caliber yet they made the playoffs and even won rounds. It was only possible because of Karlsson and his ability to dominate the ice and make his teammates better, this ability is unrivaled by any on this list.
Doughty was a Norris runner-up in two years his team was pretty crap and was playing at that level most of this year as well. Keith was awesome, Father Time finally showed up is all.
I would agree in the sense that EK as an offensive catalyst can push a team like that, but Doughty's 'play' dropping is largely a myth and based on 1.5 seasons of bad play while ignoring largely all the other evidence (pre 2012, now). He's carried a pretty mediocre d-core and sometimes lottery team to the brink of the playoffs and in most seasons. Everyone is loving on Alec Martinez lately--in the absence of Doughty vs. Vegas in 2018, our top pairing with Marty was ~30% CF, while Drew was nearly 60% for the series. look at the Kings dcore without him this year, it's laughable. He's nearly 5% CF and GF rel to his shitty team despite playing nearly half a game on a lottery team with all the hardest minutes.
I guess my point is that your perceived 'drop' in play is inaccurate and your ongoing attempts (god, how many years is this now, seriously) to paint DD as a passenger (relative to other great dmen) on great teams rather than the driver is getting yawn-worthy. I feel like I can just copypasta this response from thread to thread with you at this point.
If you can overlook bad play by Karlsson for two years, you can also forgive Drew for the same with respect to their legacies.
With respect to the contradiction mentioned above--I get what you're saying, the great dmen make their teams that much better whether they are good or bad. Every name mentioned in this thread has done so in spades in large part over their career.
