It truly defies my understanding why hockey fans are so finnicky about this and many other terms like what defines elite, franchise player, star, superstar, legend.
Like growing up I always felt that by the context of the word itself, generational just meant the players that stood far above their peers and defined a generation of the sport. Only to find that many like OP are too lazy to say that guys like Gretzky, Lemieux, and Orr were in a league of their own relative to the rest of the all time greats and need some super special gold star sticker of a word to apply to these exalted few players and then get very upset when it's applied to anyone else.
It's honestly just f***ing weird to see anyone get so worked up about this considering it's an arbitrary concept used by sports fans in a different way than the established dictionary definition of the word. Like I rarely define anything about hockey fandom as "dorky" but getting worked up about this is straight up dorky.
Like growing up I always felt that by the context of the word itself, generational just meant the players that stood far above their peers and defined a generation of the sport. Only to find that many like OP are too lazy to say that guys like Gretzky, Lemieux, and Orr were in a league of their own relative to the rest of the all time greats and need some super special gold star sticker of a word to apply to these exalted few players and then get very upset when it's applied to anyone else.
It's honestly just f***ing weird to see anyone get so worked up about this considering it's an arbitrary concept used by sports fans in a different way than the established dictionary definition of the word. Like I rarely define anything about hockey fandom as "dorky" but getting worked up about this is straight up dorky.