I'd still much rather do a project ranking peaks. We've never, ever done anything of the sorts before. It would be something completely new & different.
We've ranked pre-consolidation players previously as part of top 100 & 200. And a lot of posters have already replied saying they're interested, but likely to have limited time to actually do extra research. I suspect it'll be difficult to get enough active participation and contributions to make this project worthwhile
I like the "best peak" idea as well, but the challenge is, how do we define it?
Best single season is probably the cleanest, easiest way. But then we'd probably have to limit it to one season per player, otherwise the top 20 is going to be nothing but Gretzky, Orr, Lemieux and probably Howe. But limiting it to one season per player would underrate just how great those four were. Plus, part of the challenge would be figuring out which season is chosen for each (maybe there's some value in debating which Gretzky season from 1982 to 1987 was the best, but a lot of this would be rehashing what's been discussed many times before).
If we stick to the best season idea, how do we deal with playoffs? Sometimes a player has a really strong playoff run during their best regular season (Malkin in 2009 and Sakic in 2001 are semi-recent examples). But sometimes a player is completely underwhelming in the playoffs in their best year (Dionne in 1980, Mikita in 1967, Kucherov in 2019, etc). Maybe it doesn't matter much for Dionne, but Kucherov had some very strong playoff performances - would we ignore those just because they didn't happen during his Hart-winning season?
What do we do with players who never had a "signature" season where they put it all together? Forsberg had a year where he won the Hart and Art Ross, but he wasn't at his best by that point (it was a great season of course, but he won those trophies because of weak competition and that was one of only a few years where he was reasonably healthy). Many other "versions" of Forsberg were better (1997 regular season, 1999 RS & PO, 2002 playoffs, 2004 regular season, 2006 before getting injured, etc). So there's a disconnect between how good Forsberg was at his peak, versus how good his peak season was. He'd get underrated if we're only looking at a single season.
If we look at a longer period of time - how long do we look? This would have a big impact on the results. For example, if we define it as "best six consecutive seasons including playoffs", Guy LaFleur would almost certainly be #5 (and, truthfully, maybe even higher). If it's "best three non-consecutive seasons, pick and choose whichever playoff runs", he'd still rank highly, but not nearly as much as before.
Or we let everyone decide their own definition. But then we're comparing apples to oranges, and I don't think the end result would be a coherent list.
None of these would prevent us from doing this project. Just that these are things we'd have to sort out in advance.
