i guess the other way to look at this is, what would vlady have to do to make the hall if derian hatcher and adam foote didn't/haven't?
his peak is higher than both, but i don't know that it's as big as the norris voting suggests. still, would hatcher and foote be in with two years like vlady had in '96 and '97? what would they have to add beyond that?
this would set a longevity baseline for a hypothetically healthy konstantinov. then you would ask how likely it would be for him to stay that healthy.
I don’t know that I’d assume the worst for a player that missed just 12 games in 6 years while playing a physical game. More than that, Konstantinov’s GA numbers through 77-82 games (especially in the final two seasons of his career) look like Foote’s and Hatcher’s GA numbers in their injury years in the Dead Puck Era.
Paired with Bourque in 2001, Colorado allowed 26 GA in 35 games with Foote on the ice at even-strength. The following year on the Jennings-winning Avalanche, it was 39 GA in 55 games. Hatcher’s best were 46 GA in 70 games on 167 GA Dallas in 1998 and 42 GA in 57 games on 184 GA Dallas in 2000. Compare to the 34 GA in 81 games and 39 GA in 77 games on Detroit teams that had worse goaltending and allowed more raw GA as the lower-scoring era hadn’t hit full swing.
It’s a major contributing factor to why he doubles their plus-minus despite having played just 6 seasons.
More than that, he was Detroit’s highly-publicized answer for Peter Forsberg in the playoffs in a way that Fedorov and Chelios wouldn’t be after he was gone. Of Forsberg’s 5 combined points in the 1996 and 1997 playoff series vs. Detroit, I believe more than half came when Crawford managed to get him on the ice away from Konstantinov. So with respect to Foote on Tkachuk in 2001, I think even the playoff narratives swing in Konstantinov’s favor.
But the timing of his best two years coming against 1996 Chelios, 1996 Bourque, and 1997 Leetch could have been better. There’s a lot more vulnerability after that, so if his final seasons weren’t a fluke and he doesn’t fall off a cliff, there are worse ways to spend your 30s than collecting games on Detroit from 1998-2008 like his replacement Chelios did.