Sakic/Yzerman
Francis/Perreault
Hawerchuk/Savard
Smith/Federko
Broten/Muller
i would knock francis down to the smith/federko tier, and i don't see any real daylight between perreault and hawerchuk/savard, but that looks right to me. muller, i don't think, really counts as a center.
i think, all-time, there is a range of post-expansion guys that you could group together: ratelle, perreault, sittler, stastny, savard, hawerchuk, larionov, oates, modano, sundin. (i'm not sure which post-2000 players i'd put in that group. kopitar might be the only player that is tracking to bona fide belong. the other likeliest names: datsyuk, zetterberg, sedin, and yes toews are all a little too mercurial, all are special cases of one sort or another, which isn't saying necessarily that they're better or worse, just different. the guys listed above all had long, consistent and straightforward primes as elite but not super-elite players.)
but in that mass of guys, i think there are some things we can say almost definitively. perreault > sittler. stastny was a little better than savard and hawerchuk. modano > sundin.
of all those players, the highest single-season peaks might be hawerchuk and oates. hawerchuk is the only guy where you could say he could have won a hart trophy if gretzky didn't exist. oates if he doesn't miss 20 games in the '91 season and if there is no gretzky might also fall into that category. there's a decent argument that stastny probably deserved more hart support, though, and that in a gretzky-less world we might not blink at him winning a hart in '82, '83, or '84. lafontaine, who was also invoked above, "only" would have finished second in hart voting in his peak year if mario hadn't existed.
as for the leafs players, sundin never sniffed a hart trophy, and he peaked alongside iginla, st. louis, markus naslund, "average" seasons from sakic, brodeur, luongo, kiprusoff, spike jose theodore, 36 year old patrick roy, 38 year old belfour, 38 year old francis, young ilya kovalchuk, marty turco, unicorn season sean burke. that's the complete list of players who finished ahead of sundin in hart voting the two years he was a second team all-star. in hawerchuk's best season, he finished behind 200 point gretzky and 200 point gretzky only. in his other two best years, he finished behind trottier's second best year, bossy's best year, stastny's best year, bourque's second best year, gretzky, mario, and liut and gilmour. hawerchuk was just a more competitive player in relation to his peers, in a much deeper era.
sittler i even have trouble with putting him in that list of superstar centers. to me, he's the clear lowest player on that list, buoyed by one career season. i just don't see that much of a distinction between him and federko, to be honest, except that one spike season by sittler and the logos on the fronts of their jerseys.
and to say something about hawerchuk's buffalo years, yes he peaked early, but he also started falling apart early. anyone who watched the sedins over the last decade can probably see the comparison i'm about to make: '80s hawerchuk was a superstar player from the day he stepped into the league. he peaked in years 4-8 ('85-'88), where you could compare him to the sedins' two peak seasons in the best year or two of that peak. then he loses a big step, physically. he starts to become more and more PP-reliant, where he is often brilliant, and still puts up fringe top-ten points but is no longer the same player. also, his shots and goals go way down, but his assists take only a minor dip. think: henrik sedin finishing 7th and 10th in points in 2012 and 2015.
here are hawerchuk's scoring placements up to the point where his wheels fall off:
first three seasons: 12, 16 (sophomore slump), 11
peak: 3, 9, 7, 4
last two winnipeg years: 11 (falls to 22nd in shots, after always being in the top 10 and more often than not in the top 5), 34 (unhappy last season, falls to 41st in shots)
buffalo years: 17, 11 (3rd in PP points), 26 (9th in PP points), 24 (10th in PP points)
