Michael Farkas
Celebrate 68
Best = most talented? That's a lot of scouting work...
Have you reached out to @Iain Fyffe for his information? I think he's already done all this work.Related note, for all those that do original newspaper digging, please let me know if you find games that I don't have with positions . I can make a google sheet bounty list of something similar to fill in the gaps, I'm trying to have pretty full picture of every single game
I'd love to have complete position logs for ECHA/NHA/PCHA/WCHL/NHL
My eastern league work was largely centered around Taylor so most gaps are because I didn't aggressively search for non Ottawa/Renfrew games and then once he went west in 1912 I stopped worrying about it at the time.
I've been aiming to try and have a copy from a home/away paper for most of these games, and my PCHA based coverage is currently a lot better, but I'll be revving up the research machine soon
RB's ECHA/NHA/NHL Position Thread
RB's PCHA/WCHL/WHL Position Thread
Edit: Peel's Prairie Provinces - Sources for Western Canada and Western Canadian History If you want to hunt through western papers the University of Alberta has this free resource. It's search function isn't particularly great, but you can find some good information if you're willing to put in the effort for the PCHA and WCHL
Have you reached out to @Iain Fyffe for his information? I think he's already done all this work.
The top-5 should be shoo-ins, Connell is ineligible (post-merger)@rmartin65 and I have been casually talking about goalies in PMs
What's everyone's feeling on the crop of candidates? Looking at our past top 40 goalie list
Vezina
Benedict
Lehman
Holmes
LeSueur
Connell
Are all that made the list, how many more deserving candidates do we feel are out there?
Off the top of my head (just throwing goalies from the period out there) Riley Hern, Bert Lindsay, Ross Roach, Paddy Moran, Bouse Hutton?
Hern, Moran and Hutton shouldn't just be considered, they probably should be in. On a top-60 list, what's the correct number of goalies? 8-9? The seeming consensus top-5 are all from the same generation too, and I don't think I like the way that looks. Lesueur is a tad older than them, then those next three are all the same age. That already gets us to 9 before we even think of Paton (who was more dominant in his own era than any of them).
Yeah Hainsworth is difficult for this project. He played to on of pre-consolidation hockey. But for the project I might say OUT. I believe his first season in top OHA level was in 1915-1916. Before that he played with Berlin in intermediates (I guess to simplify that in second level of senior hockey). Then in 1916-1917 in some amateur league which is not familiar to me.I left out Hainsworth because he's harder to judge. I have no formula to just determine when he was truly at his best. Surely, his most famous years are 1927, 1928 and 1929 (when he won the vezina despite not really being known as one of the few best goalies), and 1930 and 1931 (when he won the cup and a retro smythe). But the years in which he actually got some individual recognition were 1918 & 1920 (OHA 1st AST), 1921 & 1923 (OHA 2nd AST), and 1926 (WHL AST). Is all that enough to overcome actual NHL achievements, as team-oriented as they were? I dunno. He was 31 before he played an NHL game.
I just scanned through Iain Fyffe's lists of 1880s-1920s players and there's really no one there that we haven't already discussed, and he even has them pretty much in the order we would:
For post-1910:
Benedict
Vezina
Lehman
Holmes
Lesueur
For 1900s:
Moran
Hern
Hutton
For 1890s, no one.
For 1880s, only Paton.
Off the top of my head, if we ended up with 9 goalies and it was them, I'd be pretty satisfied. I hope we discuss a few others, though.
Finished this two days ago. It was really tough to put down. There has never been another book where you will read such detailed accounts of the play of the best players and teams of the 1880s and 1890s. But as good as that is, it's secondary to the off-ice material regarding Stewart, which is part human-interest piece, part hockey Origins story. @moreyhockey makes a good case that James Creighton's 1875 game has no more of a case to be known as the beginning of hockey, than does the drafting and publication of the rules by Stewart and others a decade later (many of which still exist today). If you consider yourself a historian, do yourself a favor and get this book.
I think we have strong evidence that we should take 1920-1926 OHA achievements seriously. I am less sure about prior to that.Charles Stewart was a name poking around the backend of my goalie list. He was very strong in the OHA, but struggled coming into the NHL. It depends on how many goalies I end up with, but I have him around 10-12 right now. I struggle with quantifying the strength of the OHA. The NHA and PCHA are the clear league kings in the 1910s, but I do not know the gap between them and the top amateur leagues. What is the talent gap between the OHA and NHA of 1915? Are we talking present day NHL/AHL, where anything in the AHL is largely discarded? Or are we talking closer to 1972-~1975 NHL/WHA, where the WHA competition was high and part of legitimate comparison?
I'm also interested in pre-Bowie dominance. If we say he established himself as the best ever offensive player in the 1904-1908 time period, who is he taking that crown from?
McDougall and Routh are two of the early skaters that I really hope we get more research on.I think we have strong evidence that we should take 1920-1926 OHA achievements seriously. I am less sure about prior to that.
As for Bowie..... honestly, probably Bob McDougall!
Am I the only one having difficulty in comparing the pre-1900 players to those who played after?
That's a big part of it for sure.The biggest issue I'm having is the idea of "longevity"
Am I the only one having difficulty in comparing the pre-1900 players to those who played after?
That's a big part of it for sure.
The AHAC is the largest league of the 1890s, but is it the only league worth discussing?
Routh isn't in the Hall, no, but in the Iain Fyffe article that @seventieslord has linked to a couple of times, Fyffe argues that he should be by his system. I find Fyffe's opinion rather difficult to ignore there. I'm going to err on the side that he knows something that others don't.Part of what I struggle with is the huge year-to-year variance.
Haviland Routh scored 19 goals in 8 games in the 1895 AHAC season. This is after scoring 8 in 8 the year before. However, looking closer, he scored 5 of his 8 goals in one game on opening night in 1894.
So how do we look at that. 8 in 8 is a close third in the league. But 3 in 7 is good for about 15th (of about only 30 skaters in the entire league). And there is very little information about him in general on the internet. He didn't make the HHOF, so maybe he's just not going to make our discussions.
Bob MacDougall is looking like the best forward of the 1890s, but the difference in peak play between MacDougall and Routh doesn't look to be too terribly different. But Routh was out of the league in four years and MacDougall played 7, playing in 6 Stanley Cups. Small sample sizes and huge variance between years makes it really hard to separate players.
The AHAC is the largest league of the 1890s, but is it the only league worth discussing?
No, we should also be looking at the MHA (Manitoba Hockey Association), which morphs into the league the Kenora Thistles played in at the turn of the century.
Edit: This is the league Dan Bain played in
List of pre-NHL seasons - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
I've found this handy too, but the MHA is completely absent from their records.