HOH Top 60 Goaltenders of All Time (2024 Edition) - Round 2, Vote 3

[rmartin65]

But that's not what happened. 15 years after 1965 it got worse. I think I was and am one of the leading people here that said "the early 80's is almost as bad as War time hockey"...

But then why did Gretzky say it got better? It is a contemporary quote, which you claim we shouldn't just through away because it disagrees with our world view.

In fact, most of the accounts from the early 50's is that the game is easier for skaters (skaters had a tougher time back in the 20's and were better then)...the only exception that's consistent: goaltending. Which jives with film, stats of non-goalies, and the logical trajectory of the position that we have full scope of, etc.

Are we only looking at the early 50s? No, if we are big on contemporary opinions, we should be looking at the entire scope of history.

And again, respectfully, I feel like you are consistently missing the greater point that I am trying to make- better does not mean greater. You can drop the worst goalie in today's NHL into 1960 (to pick a random-ish time) and I am willing to bet that he is the best goalie in the world. As you are so quick to note, the position has evolved. The techniques and best practices that the early guys pioneered grew. But the worst NHL goalie today isn't historically greater than Plante- I think we can agree on that- even if he would stop more pucks than Plante.

I can do calculus; Pythagoras couldn't. The worst army in the world today would demolish the Romans or the Mongols. Things generally build on each other, but that doesn't make the new thing greater within a historical context.

We really like the contemporary opinion until it says something we don't like...over and over again at this point.

Then why are you so quick to discount Gretzky's opinion? Or Richard's? They are contemporary opinions who are disagreeing with your outlook.

Rhetorically, how many people have to say: pre-forward pass goaltending wasn't anything special before we unhook from a previously unfounded position that it was something? I can't help but wonder what would happen if this became canon first, instead of the current affirmative action era bias taking place haha

I don't think making arguments like "affirmative action era bias" is a productive one. I think people want players from each and every ea evaluated within the historical environment they existed in.

There is no watershed moment where established goalies suddenly couldn't cope. The greatest active goalie is, who, Vasilevskiy? Who overlapped with Carey Price, or, better, Henrik Lundqvist (who people seem to really like this round), who overlapped with Brodeur and Hasek, who overlapped with Roy, who overlapped with Billy Smith, who overlapped with Dryden, Parent, Esposito, who overlapped with Plante, Worsely, and Hall, who overlapped with Lumley, who overlapped with Brimsek, who overlapped with Thompson, who overlapped with Hainsworth, Gardiner, Worters, who overlapped with Connell, Benedict, who overlapped with Vezina, who overlapped with LeSeuer, Moran, Nicholson, who overlapped with Hutton and Stocking, who overlapped with Merritt, who overlapped with Paton, and now we are back to the 1880s. Talented players find a way to stay relevant as the times change- that is why they are all time greats.

 

[Professor What]

I feel like there's some "time machining" going on with some of the questioning of the earlier guys. Yeah, they almost certainly weren't as good, but they didn't have the advantages of modern training, years of history to learn from, modern nutrition, modern medicine, etc. I'm sure some folks are tired of reading that, because it's said often enough, but I think it keeps happening, so it has to be repeated.

To build on the Pythagoras thought. What might he have done if he were a contemporary of Isaac Newton? Would he have beaten Newton to the punch? Would they have worked together on the discipline? At the very least, I have no doubt that he would have soaked it all up quickly and put it to good use. I think we can safely say who was the better mathematician, that being Newton, but not who's the greater. Because, let's make Newton a contemporary of Pythagoras now, and there's zero chance he's inventing calculus at that time. The groundwork just hadn't been laid.

Re: the contemporary opinion stuff. Yeah, I think that it has to be a key part of what we're doing, but I think we have to use it judiciously. All of it isn't of the same value. The Gretzky stuff is a good example to me. Gretzky has always been overly diplomatic, so everything is always the best and everyone is always the greatest. I'm not trying to criticize him for that. He's in a pretty unique position as far as hockey nobility is concerned, and there's every reason to be as unoffensive as possible. But that also means that you can't take everything he says at face value. There's almost always some diplomacy at work.

 

[Michael Farkas]

But then why did Gretzky say it got better? It is a contemporary quote, which you claim we shouldn't just through away because it disagrees with our world view.

Has anyone ever taken any Gretzky quote seriously? But even if so, is he really sitting there and considering eras and the massive changes in rules and everything that Adams, Gottselig, Boucher, etc. are? I mean, the guys that are saying these things are being very specific...very pointed about it.

Gretzky talking about hockey from when he was 6 is a lot different than the guys that played/coached/managed on both sides, right?

Are we only looking at the early 50s? No, if we are big on contemporary opinions, we should be looking at the entire scope of history.

No, these quotes are across a couple decades around this time. That way there's an obvious means of comparison. I wouldn't expect anyone today to know what 1915 hockey looked like or remember it haha. So, the wheelhouse for knowing what it looked like then vs. a more modern game/position would be in this timeframe. And it is overwhelmingly discussed one way.

And again, respectfully, I feel like you are consistently missing the greater point that I am trying to make- better does not mean greater. You can drop the worst goalie in today's NHL into 1960 (to pick a random-ish time) and I am willing to bet that he is the best goalie in the world. As you are so quick to note, the position has evolved. The techniques and best practices that the early guys pioneered grew. But the worst NHL goalie today isn't historically greater than Plante- I think we can agree on that- even if he would stop more pucks than Plante.

And I don't agree with the "drop a goalie" thing. The worst goalie today would be awful and do much worse than Plante in 1960. This isn't about individual goalies. This is about the position and the league as a whole.

I'll ask again...if 1965 hockey is a 9 or 10 out of 10 in terms of quality. What is 1915 split-league hockey? What is 1955 Soviet hockey?

What is the reason that Plante/Sawchuk/Hall are up there and Vasilevskiy or Price or Vezina are not? If every era needs IMMEDIATE representation because someone said "this guy was the best" - then how come the positions aren't fixed? Aren't we trying to adjust for quality while still also representing the entire of history of the league?

But no, I don't agree. The worst goalie in the NHL would not stop more pucks than Plante. I don't think there's a chance in hell of that, in fact.

I can do calculus; Pythagoras couldn't. The worst army in the world today would demolish the Romans or the Mongols. Things generally build on each other, but that doesn't make the new thing greater within a historical context.



Then why are you so quick to discount Gretzky's opinion? Or Richard's? They are contemporary opinions who are disagreeing with your outlook.

As addressed, Gretzky just says stuff...he's not critical, he's just a flowery "everything is great but me" guy. Do you accept his commentary in 1982 about hockey in 1967 when he was 5 or 6 years old as equally valid as Jack Adams - who was born in like 1895 commenting on 1920s and 1950s hockey?

I agree with Richard's very, very well thought about opinion that "hockey is better today" in 1965. It was. 1965 hockey was better than anything we had before. He's right. His non-specific, gloss-over, one-liner is correct. So, I accept that one too.

I don't think making arguments like "affirmative action era bias" is a productive one. I think people want players from each and every ea evaluated within the historical environment they existed in.

Why isn't Vezina #1 then?

There is no watershed moment where established goalies suddenly couldn't cope.

Watershed? Maybe, maybe not. But there's a lot of evidence that there was a major, major shift that changed the position forever. Film, contemporary opinion, and statistics all point to more or less the same general area.

Questions left unanswered:
League quality coefficients?
Why was this same issue not considered with the top non-NHL Europeans list?
If the "best in the first 50 years of hockey" is actually the value that it's being hawked as...why is Vezina not #1? And if he's not #1, what difference does it make to "fair era representation" if he's 11th all time or 21st all time? He's gonna make the list and he's gonna be high.

 

[overpass]

And again, respectfully, I feel like you are consistently missing the greater point that I am trying to make- better does not mean greater. You can drop the worst goalie in today's NHL into 1960 (to pick a random-ish time) and I am willing to bet that he is the best goalie in the world. As you are so quick to note, the position has evolved. The techniques and best practices that the early guys pioneered grew. But the worst NHL goalie today isn't historically greater than Plante- I think we can agree on that- even if he would stop more pucks than Plante.

Mike has disagreed and I'll disagree too. I don't think the worst goalie in today's NHL would be particularly close to Plante if you sent him back to 1960 without modern equipment. Even putting aside the lack of familiarity with the equipment and the players of 1960, why suppose that a random modern goaltender is a better athlete or student of the game than Jacques Plante was?

I can do calculus; Pythagoras couldn't. The worst army in the world today would demolish the Romans or the Mongols. Things generally build on each other, but that doesn't make the new thing greater within a historical context.

I've thought about your example of Pythagoras and mathematics, and I think I've been able to pinpoint where it falls down for me as a comparison to hockey. It's that math has no opponent, and hockey is a competitive game which always has an opponent. Statics vs dynamics.

Mathematical techniques can be developed, learned, and executed, building upon past discoveries, in a way which allows today's student to reliably excel yesterday's master. But in sporting competition, technique is the servant to the man. Techniques are constantly tested, deployed, and alternated against an opponent who is doing the same. One can't simply learn a series of hockey techniques and then succeed with them in a competitive game. A certain level of hockey IQ and athleticism is required to apply techniques to game success.

If you took a modern engineer who had mastered his engineering calculations back to ancient Egypt, he could apply them to the building of the Great Pyramid with 100% reliability. But if you took a modern junior hockey player who's a great stickhandler back to an NHL game of the past, his moves would get figured out pretty quickly by opposing teams and players and he would become ineffective, unless he had the elite hockey IQ and athleticism to read and react to the game. (Assuming his modern stickhandling tricks would translate to sticks and ice surfaces of the past.)

 

[Michael Farkas]

I feel like there's some "time machining" going on with some of the questioning of the earlier guys. Yeah, they almost certainly weren't as good, but they didn't have the advantages of modern training, years of history to learn from, modern nutrition, modern medicine, etc.

I don't want this whole post to get lost, but most of it was already addressed. But I don't think it's fair to say that it's time machining. What's being said by me and the contemporary opinions is, generally, that: the skaters could play. Morenz, Joliat, Siebert, Shore, Nighbor, etc. etc. not only could they have played, they might have been better than 40's and early 50's guys. I think that may well have been right, as 40's hockey doesn't impress me very much on the whole.

It's specifically the goalies that can't do it. And since we're specifically doing a goalie list, this seems very relevant. It's the "top" goalies of all time. Not the "top goalie of each decade, followed by the second-top goalie of each decade after that...list"...

 

[Professor What]

I don't want this whole post to get lost, but most of it was already addressed. But I don't think it's fair to say that it's time machining. What's being said by me and the contemporary opinions is, generally, that: the skaters could play. Morenz, Joliat, Siebert, Shore, Nighbor, etc. etc. not only could they have played, they might have been better than 40's and early 50's guys. I think that may well have been right, as 40's hockey doesn't impress me very much on the whole.

It's specifically the goalies that can't do it. And since we're specifically doing a goalie list, this seems very relevant. It's the "top" goalies of all time. Not the "top goalie of each decade, followed by the second-top goalie of each decade after that...list"...

How much of that with the 40s has to do with the war years? You basically "lose" half the decade because of that. If that's what it is, I don't really see how it affects some of the goalies that we have up for discussion right now. Brimsek in the last round, and Broda in this one were absent for some of those years. I can see how it would cause one to question Durnan a bit as he lost his toughest competition, but I didn't have him very high on my ballot last round (without looking, I think I had him eighth).

And I agree with you that it's not the best of each era followed by the second best, etc., but I'm not sure I see how that's been bourn out so far. I mean, in the first round, we basically voted in the top three of two different eras. It seems to me that that's saying that we certainly view some eras as stronger than others. I mean, unless you count Vezina as pre-NHL (I don't since he played most of his seasons in the NHL), we could end up with Ed Belfour, the #4 guy of his generation going on the list before any pre-NHL guys do.

Ultimately, (and this isn't aimed at you Mike, I suppose I'm just venting general frustration from recent months) that's what bothers me so badly about the crowd that refuses to acknowledge that anything good could come out of hockey's early eras. They charge that there's a reverse era bias going on, where we want to put all eras on an equal footing, but the facts don't bear that out. We aren't even talking about amateurs yet. Anyway, rant over.

 

[Michael Farkas]

refuses to acknowledge that anything good

And that's the problem too...this isn't being said in this project. Quite simply, that is not the conclusion. And I know you're saying not at me, but I'm also cognizant that I'm leading the charge on this in some way. This wasn't a thought I had coming in either. It's only after I did the bulk of my research for this project that I went, "hmph...goaltending looks to get pretty weak...skaters hold up well."

And now we see a lot of the same hockey people that we covet all time lists from and the like saying, "yeah, the skaters were gold. Goaltending is the thing that really improved in this time period. It went from stick the fat slow guy in the net to the best athletes."

From my point of view, I think it would be a little silly to trot out a goalie from a time period that is panned by the people that saw it (not a skater...this isn't a mark against Shore or Morenz or Joliat or whoever...I'd go to bat for those guys right now. If anything I think Joliat is underrated)...it's the position we're talking about. It didn't evolve. We see the huge issues that occur when goaltending gets touched even a little bit...

The backup goalie rule set back the goaltending talent pool by decades. Expansion killed it. The new rules of the lockout sort of hit the reset button for all but like 5 goalies. Every time someone fiddles with the knobs, it's not forwards that fall on their face...

- Triple the league size?
Forwards: No problem! I have some random ass guys with point per game seasons aplenty...
Goalies: We, uhh, we still only have like four relevant guys. There's almost no one in the pipeline because the backup goalie thing - we weren't ready for that after 50 years of backup goalies playing. Umm, what we can do is extend the careers of the guys that used to be good well into their retirement ages...if that would help. Plante, Sawchuk, Hall, etc.

- Add some more power plays and open up east-west play a bit?
Forwards: Absolutely! Finally, us little guys can play more without getting killed.
Goalies: Uhhh...we are gonna leave you with advanced age Brodeur, Luongo with 100,000 miles on him, and a guy who fishes all summer in Finland...we're gonna need, I don't know, like 10 years to adjust to this. We have a ton of journeyman that are indiscernible from one to the next...if you want to rotate through them for a while...

It's just a more fragile position, it's always been behind the skaters evolution wise, it seldom has meaningful depth (ratio in the O6 era, notwithstanding). So if the project is specialized towards goaltending, then I feel it ought to be responsive to goaltending.

Maybe in a larger project - like a top 100 or what have you - where there isn't the time or desire to sit there evaluate things like this...maybe that's just a clip show, a compilation/Best Of album and that's fine. But in that case, we better be awfully careful about how we do things in the specialized list.

I think it's a disservice to the history of the game to try to color by number here. We have a specialized, single-position list and there's partial rejection about learning about the position itself in some ways. And I don't mean we all have to sit around and learn about fingers up vs fingers out pros and cons, but it might be another decade before we get to sit here and do the work on this, I think we could be a little bit more thoughtful than "3rd of this era vs 1st of this era" that's color by numbers to me. That's not art.

 

[VanIslander]

Leonardo da Vinci was stupid 'cuz he couldn't pass a 4th-year engineering undergraduate 2024 state exam on aerodynamics.

 

[Professor What]

And that's the problem too...this isn't being said in this project. Quite simply, that is not the conclusion. And I know you're saying not at me, but I'm also cognizant that I'm leading the charge on this in some way. This wasn't a thought I had coming in either. It's only after I did the bulk of my research for this project that I went, "hmph...goaltending looks to get pretty weak...skaters hold up well."

And now we see a lot of the same hockey people that we covet all time lists from and the like saying, "yeah, the skaters were gold. Goaltending is the thing that really improved in this time period. It went from stick the fat slow guy in the net to the best athletes."

From my point of view, I think it would be a little silly to trot out a goalie from a time period that is panned by the people that saw it (not a skater...this isn't a mark against Shore or Morenz or Joliat or whoever...I'd go to bat for those guys right now. If anything I think Joliat is underrated)...it's the position we're talking about. It didn't evolve. We see the huge issues that occur when goaltending gets touched even a little bit...

The backup goalie rule set back the goaltending talent pool by decades. Expansion killed it. The new rules of the lockout sort of hit the reset button for all but like 5 goalies. Every time someone fiddles with the knobs, it's not forwards that fall on their face...

- Triple the league size?
Forwards: No problem! I have some random ass guys with point per game seasons aplenty...
Goalies: We, uhh, we still only have like four relevant guys. There's almost no one in the pipeline because the backup goalie thing - we weren't ready for that after 50 years of backup goalies playing. Umm, what we can do is extend the careers of the guys that used to be good well into their retirement ages...if that would help. Plante, Sawchuk, Hall, etc.

- Add some more power plays and open up east-west play a bit?
Forwards: Absolutely! Finally, us little guys can play more without getting killed.
Goalies: Uhhh...we are gonna leave you with advanced age Brodeur, Luongo with 100,000 miles on him, and a guy who fishes all summer in Finland...we're gonna need, I don't know, like 10 years to adjust to this. We have a ton of journeyman that are indiscernible from one to the next...if you want to rotate through them for a while...

It's just a more fragile position, it's always been behind the skaters evolution wise, it seldom has meaningful depth (ratio in the O6 era, notwithstanding). So if the project is specialized towards goaltending, then I feel it ought to be responsive to goaltending.

Maybe in a larger project - like a top 100 or what have you - where there isn't the time or desire to sit there evaluate things like this...maybe that's just a clip show, a compilation/Best Of album and that's fine. But in that case, we better be awfully careful about how we do things in the specialized list.

I think it's a disservice to the history of the game to try to color by number here. We have a specialized, single-position list and there's partial rejection about learning about the position itself in some ways. And I don't mean we all have to sit around and learn about fingers up vs fingers out pros and cons, but it might be another decade before we get to sit here and do the work on this, I think we could be a little bit more thoughtful than "3rd of this era vs 1st of this era" that's color by numbers to me. That's not art.

First of all, as I said, that criticism wasn't aimed at you. I probably shouldn't have even said it here. It's more of a general frustration on the forum that I have. I'm not going to name any names, but I'm sure you think of some of the same ones I do. I think I'm partially afraid that some of this could go in that direction, but no, you're right, it hasn't been said in this project, I apologize if my comment came out wrong.

Where I think you and I are disagreeing is on the color by number part. What I was trying to say is basically that I don't think we've been doing that. There hasn't been an effort to make sure all eras are represented equally, it's just people making the argument for the eras where they fall in. It's a disagreement on where that is.

I'm not trying to shut either side down. I think there discussion has been great and I want to see it keep going. Quite frankly, it would be boring if everyone were on the same page.