How good was Howie Morenz?

[Michael Farkas]

Well, except it was a half a decade after the War ended...

So...Richard did...not play in War-affected seasons then...? Are you ChatGPT? haha

 

[MadLuke]

War-torn league...

isn't that quite different than a 1920s and great depression league ? with the others pro league of the time CAHL, AHA and co.

Was a war torn league a better way to compare those 2 than what the 06 became ?

 

[Michael Farkas]

isn't that quite different than a 1920s and great depression league ? with the others pro league of the time CAHL, AHA and co.

Was a war torn league a better way to compare those 2 than what the 06 became ?

It seems like the War years are quite different than the folks-wanting-gainful-employment-during-a-depression league, yes. Did the CAHL or AHA do anything more than the upcoming A(I)HL? I'm not under the impression that it did, but I could be mistaken.

It seems like and looks like the bottom really fell out of the NHL in the 40's. And because you're not only losing players, you're having players that might not have access to hockey during the War, all the development players and prospects and would-be players from the talent pool that also likely took part in the War...I think it makes a lot of sense how dilapidated it reads, computates, and looks...and it takes a little bit to recover from that. The ol' "the War ended in '45, so everything snapped back to how it was" is really quite a trip. I don't see that as logical, personally.

I'm open to other ideas, of course. But it doesn't seem like it was that close league quality-wise...once it recovered from WWI, it seemed to be generally in a good place. Naturally, still formative (like forward passing advents), but generally in a good spot with adaptive players. Probably could have done with one less team, generally, throughout the 30's...but, hey, that's a formative league for ya...

 

[MadLuke]

Sure I have no doubt the league fall down around 44 and took a while to recover, but did it fall down under what the league was in the 20s early 30s ? I imagine that just impossible to know, there about 0 video to tell.

NHLer in the 20s would still have some player that did not grew up playing hockey, some montreal subsitute player description in the press sounded like;
"When he got up a full head of steam it seemed uncertain if he could be stopped or stop himself.
The Aurele joliat that started to play organised hockey as teens would have had a good advantage over that field. Who stayed in the weak nhl, still had played batman organized hockey growing up and what not.

I could be underestimating youth hockey of the 1910s here.

But regardless of 43-44-45-46-47 nhl level versus 1926-1936 nhl actual level, a drop in the nhl would have been seen by the contemporary and would have been taken into a consideration, there was a lot of talk of wait until real man come back into the league for sure.

 

[Michael Farkas]

"When he got up a full head of steam it seemed uncertain if he could be stopped or stop himself.

This line also describes Mason Raymond haha. How many times did he just wipe out because he was going too fast for his own good?

Yeah, I don't know what this information is worth.

But I mean, look at this...in 1946 ("long" after the War, to some)



This is absolutely terrible. This is pee wee.

And then go back and compare it to this...



I know it's not much, but it's so not close...in the same way that I could put an AHL clip from today vs. a Federal League game, you wouldn't need much to ascertain that one league is dramatically better than the other.

In 1946, guys are picking up the puck and falling. There's just players strewn about. It looks like the music video for "Keep Moving" by Bronson basically. The best player in the league is getting Lindros'd by young Ted Kennedy (?) because he has the spatial awareness of a...whisker-less cat...? How many passes in the collective 1940's were accurate and didn't get the guy ahead of them killed?

And there's less teams in the bad clip, right?

Everyone here is always looking for shorthanded methods to evaluate things...you can probably see that things started to heal by 1948 and as we got into the early 50's, the league was probably quite good looking at goals per game averages...

 

[jigglysquishy]

We've used staying power as a proxy for league quality. Guys putting up 90 points in 1980 are out of the league a few years later (the Blair MacDonald rule).

This works in the 40s too. Billy Taylor finishes 3rd in league scoring in 1946-47 at age 28. He's out of the league two years later. Bud Poile finishes 6th in league scoring in 1947-48 at age 25, he's a minor leaguer three years later.You can find examples of this in any era (is Huberdeau going from 115 points to 52 points in two seasons so different?), but the frequency in the 40s is really high.

By 1948-49 this really slows down. By 1951-52, it's at basically the same rate you saw until expansion.

You could run the math if you had time in Excel on things like average age of the top 10 in scoring or mean birth year, but I think all will come back to some form of really weak hockey until ~1947 that steadily improves into the 50s and reaching relative stability by 1955.

 

[Overrated]

We've used staying power as a proxy for league quality. Guys putting up 90 points in 1980 are out of the league a few years later (the Blair MacDonald rule).

This works in the 40s too. Billy Taylor finishes 3rd in league scoring in 1946-47 at age 28. He's out of the league two years later. Bud Poile finishes 6th in league scoring in 1947-48 at age 25, he's a minor leaguer three years later.You can find examples of this in any era (is Huberdeau going from 115 points to 52 points in two seasons so different?), but the frequency in the 40s is really high.

By 1948-49 this really slows down. By 1951-52, it's at basically the same rate you saw until expansion.

You could run the math if you had time in Excel on things like average age of the top 10 in scoring or mean birth year, but I think all will come back to some form of really weak hockey until ~1947 that steadily improves into the 50s and reaching relative stability by 1955.

What do the numbers look like for the 20s and the 30s?

 

[jigglysquishy]

What do the numbers look like for the 20s and the 30s?

Pre 1926 is hard to quantify with the two big leagues, but you get relative stability into the late 20s and into the 30s.

Lots of repeats high up from 1928-1939. You get the odd high scorer that struggles a few years later, but not nearly to the degree you do in the mid to late 40s.

There's a few big examples now of guys spiking only to struggle later. Huberdeau went from 115 to 52 points in two years. Gaudreau went from 115 to 60 in the same time frame. Atkinson finished 6th in goals in 2018-19 and never finished top 25 again. Chris Kreider is a big example.

It's always a thing in the NHL. But the huge turnover in the 40s is fairly unique.

 

[Michael Farkas]

What do the numbers look like for the 20s and the 30s?

Just glancing at it randomly...

1928 top 5 scorers...
Morenz - natural curve, declines in his 30s - then dies.
Joliat - natural curve, good longevity.
Boucher - natural curve. Except, after not playing for several years and being 42 years old, he's a point per game player in 1944 - 2nd highest scoring rate of his career.
Hay - natural curve
Stewart - natural curve

I could keep going, but there was like a 120 skaters in the league haha - peeking at the rest of the top 10, it looks pretty natural.

1932 top 5 scorers...
Jackson - natural curve, except the War years, in his mid-30s he returns to his prime numbers.
Primeau - pretty natural curve, though a short career - I don't recall why he quit at 30.
Morenz - again
Conacher - natural curve
Cook - Remarkably potent so late into his 30s. So, that's a bit abnormal. But he's also considered one of the best to play ever at this point.

I know I've done this for the late 70's and early 80's and it looks quite a lot different than this. This is basically what you'd expect. It's actually cleaner than I'd expect given that I picked a year just after consolidation and then a year just after forward passing was liberalized. Either way, it looks sound...

 

[Dr John Carlson]

I could be underestimating youth hockey of the 1910s here.

I have something at least semi-relevant for this from researching George Hainsworth's time in the OHA during this period. Here's a breakdown of how many teams competed in the Ontario Hockey Association from 1902 to 1916, when the article I'm sourcing was printed (2 Dec 1916, Toronto Star):

Year	Senior Teams	Intermediate Teams	Youth Teams
1902	8	34	27
1903	8	34	27
1904	12	54	31
1905	10	48	31
1906	9	46	25
1907	10	41	34
1908	7	45	30
1909	9	44	38
1910	11	42	38
1911	8	38	42
1912	8	56	49
1913	12	50	43
1914	8	48	50
1915	8	45	45
1916	18	43	40

The OHA played seven-man hockey up until the 17-18 season, so that's between ~500 and ~800 players playing competitive, organized amateur hockey in this area of Canada (the OHA of the time was exclusive to Southern Ontario - typically as far east as Kingston and as far north as Orillia). Obviously, WWI saw a lot of the 'fat' trimmed, which explains why the numbers stopped rising in this table.

I don't have any numbers for Quebec and Ottawa at the time, but I imagine they'd be at least in the same ballpark based on the percentage of pro players they were churning out around this time. Northern Ontario and the Prairies would be contributing some too - again, I don't have numbers, but I know the various Winnipeg city amateur leagues of this decade, pre-WWI, combined to total about 15 teams.

So, there was a pretty healthy, and growing, feeder system of organized hockey below the pro level. I can't add much to compare it with the 40s, but I will say that NHL teams had to reach down and pick up some pretty raw players from the amateur leagues, often as teenagers, which we really didn't see much of in the 10s/20s/30s. My guess is that the quality of the NHL during WW2 dipped to a level below that.

 

[overpass]

Billy Taylor finishes 3rd in league scoring in 1946-47 at age 28. He's out of the league two years later.

Taylor was banned for gambling. On talent he should have lasted longer. But yeah, longevity is a guide to league quality.

You can also look at how many teenagers made the league. From consolidation in 1926-27 until 1940, almost no teenagers played a regular shift for a substantial part of the season, only a few junior phenoms. Milt Schmidt. Syd Howe. Hec Kilrea (who had the talent to be a big star but drank it away). Then in 1940, actually a couple of years before the war, more teenagers start coming in. Syl Apps was the youngest Calder winner of the 30s at 21, and then starting in 40-41, four straight Calder winners were 19 or 20. There were signs that the league was weakening before the war.

And then again from 56-57 to 66-67, the last 10 years before expansion, almost no teenagers again. Only superstars made the league at 18 or 19. Frank Mahovlich, Bobby Hull, Stan Mikita, Bobby Orr...and Dallas Smith.

 

[Vilica]

We've used staying power as a proxy for league quality. Guys putting up 90 points in 1980 are out of the league a few years later (the Blair MacDonald rule).

This works in the 40s too. Billy Taylor finishes 3rd in league scoring in 1946-47 at age 28. He's out of the league two years later. Bud Poile finishes 6th in league scoring in 1947-48 at age 25, he's a minor leaguer three years later.You can find examples of this in any era (is Huberdeau going from 115 points to 52 points in two seasons so different?), but the frequency in the 40s is really high.

By 1948-49 this really slows down. By 1951-52, it's at basically the same rate you saw until expansion.

You could run the math if you had time in Excel on things like average age of the top 10 in scoring or mean birth year, but I think all will come back to some form of really weak hockey until ~1947 that steadily improves into the 50s and reaching relative stability by 1955.

Billy Taylor's out of the league because he got banned for gambling.

You're not wrong about staying power though. Gordie Howe had mostly 2 centers when he was putting up his monster years, Metro Prystai and Dutch Reibel, and neither of them were much more than replacement level talents.

My hypothesis is that the disruption of the Great Depression and WW2 contributed to a bit of a generational gap between Howe in 1928 and Beliveau in 1931. The best forward born after Howe and before 1931 is like George Armstrong or Bronco Horvath (Beliveau was born in August of 31, Moore and Geoffrion were born in Jan/Feb).

That's the reason scoring crashed in the early 50s - there was just no scoring talent. Ted Kennedy's a top 2-3 scoring center, which is like if Ryan O'Reilly was in the top 3 in scoring nowadays. Going back to Taylor, he was one of the more talented centers of his time, gets banned, and is replaced by the 15th-20th best center (in the world at that time), who is basically replacement level. Instead of the 15th best center being akin to Anze Kopitar, it's like Mikael Granlund.


To bring this back to Morenz, look at the 33 SCF video that was posted. The defensemen essentially stay on their own blue line when their team has the puck. Can you imagine what a modern skater would do when given that much of a gap to exploit? It'd just be controlled entry after controlled entry. Even with that, Morenz put up peak seasons about the same in terms of P% as any other superstar player. 60 minutes versus 20 minutes, different equipment, assist counting spottier, 75 years of hockey evolution, and yet as a share of his team's offense, the P% is indistinguishable.

That's how you can tell a lack of scoring talent. On any given team, you have a baseline of P% simply due to ice-time. The difference between Andy Bathgate putting up multiple 40% seasons and Johnny Bucyk topping out at 33% is their inherent scoring talent. No other forwards are interfering with their ice time, and their coaches aren't limiting their power play time due to other options.

 

[MadLuke]

Even with that, Morenz put up peak seasons about the same in terms of P% as any other superstar player. 60 minutes versus 20 minutes, different equipment, assist counting spottier, 75 years of hockey evolution, and yet as a share of his team's offense, the P% is indistinguishable.

This in general a strange metric to use imo, but here that sound almost impossible to be possible, there was 3 forward playing almost all the game...

Morenz scored 28.4% of his team goals in 1928, that like scoring 85 last year, he scored 51 pts in a league that the average teams scored only 84 goals.

51 points when a team totals points is 181 (28%) would not have a modern equivalent, McDavid had 132 out of 799 (16.5%) last year, 1989 Lemieux was at 21.3%, 212 pts Gretzky had 18.9%....

If you are talking about 51 pts on 116 team goals, well there was not much more than half an assist per goal registered versus modern 1.7, such a different scoring environment assists wise that we cannot compare.

If the share of p% do not move when the team scoring was virtually only 3 players for the whole team versus now, something is going on with the system that calculate it.

 

[Michael Farkas]

My hypothesis is that the disruption of the Great Depression and WW2 contributed to a bit of a generational gap between Howe in 1928 and Beliveau in 1931. The best forward born after Howe and before 1931 is like George Armstrong or Bronco Horvath (Beliveau was born in August of 31, Moore and Geoffrion were born in Jan/Feb).

That's the reason scoring crashed in the early 50s - there was just no scoring talent.

The generational gap of 1929 and 1930? Caused by the Great Depression? Even though the Depression doesn't really kick in until way late in 1929 and is, arguably, worse for folks in 1932 and '33?

So scoring "crashed" (which is to say, it returned to how it was for an entire decade before the War years) - not because the league improved from possibly its worst state - but because only a handful of HOF skaters were produced in two birth years and not more top-5 players in history that would stand the test of the time for generations after?

Which, I guess, pins the scoring crash of the late 90's and 2000's on Jarome Iginla, Joe Thornton, Marian Hossa, etc.?

To bring this back to Morenz, look at the 33 SCF video that was posted. The defensemen essentially stay on their own blue line when their team has the puck. Can you imagine what a modern skater would do when given that much of a gap to exploit? It'd just be controlled entry after controlled entry.

That practice - especially for certain types of defensemen - continued into the 50's. Not everyone or in every situation.

We still see it in various forms.

 

[The Panther]

I really don't think WWII has as big an impact on hockey as @Michael Farkas Farkas thinks it did. Sure, the NHL (and presumably lesser leagues) were downgraded noticeably in 1943-44 and 1944-45 (and in some cases, as early as 1942-43, such as the "Kraut line" famously... but mainly those final two seasons of the war).

But hockey was -- by massive margins -- the dominant sport / pastime in Canada by the 1940s. Why would the development of young talent be greatly impacted? The young talent was at home, praticing hockey, just the same as it ever was. To my knowledge, it's not like hockey rinks closed up shop during the war.

Then, in the NHL itself, there were only 16-17 players per club, and six clubs from 1942-1945. So, each of the final three wartime seasons, there were about 105 full-time NHL jobs available (maybe 135 total, including replacement players, part-timers, taxi-squaders, etc). That means, even before the war, there was presumably a lot of good talent at the minor-pro level, waiting in the wings.

Even if 1/5 of the NHL players were away for wartime purpose each season (and I don't think it was that many), that means only 21 replacement players were in the League at any given time, for about three years. This doesn't strike me as any cause for the NHL to experience any massive drop in quality of play, outside of the two or three clubs (certainly Boston, maybe another?) that experienced a larger-than-average loss of high impact players. Those couple of clubs were obviously impacted in the short-term, but that doesn't mean the overall quality of NHL hockey greatly suffered, or that it couldn't immediately recover post-war.

And, as mentioned, I simply don't see how the development of talent / players (occuring almost entirely in Canada) would be seriously affected by wartime conditions. I could be wrong about this, but I don't see why it would be a thing. Thus, i can see maybe 1945-46 also being a season noticeably impacted by the fallout of the war, but beyond that...? I don't see it.

 

[The Panther]

Just to add to my point, above: I fully agree that the 1940s was a "strange" decade in NHL history -- there were bizarre upswings and downswings of team fortunes, no dominant clubs for a long time, and obvious scoring conditions impacted by war for a couple of seasons --, but I don't think it's the war itself that mainly caused this strangeness. It's more likely that the League was just going through one of its hurried periods of change / development, and war conditions exacerbated this for a few years.

 

[Vilica]

This in general a strange metric to use imo, but here that sound almost impossible to be possible, there was 3 forward playing almost all the game...

Morenz scored 28.4% of his team goals in 1928, that like scoring 85 last year, he scored 51 pts in a league that the average teams scored only 84 goals.

51 points when a team totals points is 181 (28%) would not have a modern equivalent, McDavid had 132 out of 799 (16.5%) last year, 1989 Lemieux was at 21.3%, 212 pts Gretzky had 18.9%....

If you are talking about 51 pts on 116 team goals, well there was not much more than half an assist per goal registered versus modern 1.7, such a different scoring environment assists wise that we cannot compare.

If the share of p% do not move when the team scoring was virtually only 3 players for the whole team versus now, something is going on with the system that calculate it.

It is basically a sliding scale, that the lack of assist counting mirrors the dive in forward ice-time as multiple lines started to be deployed. It is likely that the "true" share of team offense is more than the actual P%, but ship a modern skater back to the 1920s and play them 55 minutes a game, and in that environment, with teams being 1 line of forwards they score a higher percentage of their team's goals, but the lack of assist counting pushes that total down. It balances out and the point total remains about the same.

Look at Morenz' seasons, in the context of the 05-06 season where league average was 248, but it works no matter what that number is.

Year	% LA	G%	P%		LA GF	New GF	Goals	Assists	Points
23-24	0.922	0.220	0.271		248	228.63	50.38	11.63	62.00
24-25	1.045	0.290	0.419		248	259.15	75.24	33.44	108.67
25-26	0.952	0.291	0.329		248	236.05	68.72	8.96	77.69
26-27	1.125	0.253	0.323		248	279.00	70.45	19.73	90.18
27-28	1.381	0.284	0.440		248	342.48	97.43	53.14	150.57
28-29	1.109	0.239	0.380		248	275.13	65.88	38.75	104.63
29-30	1.092	0.282	0.373		248	270.89	76.31	24.80	101.11
30-31	1.229	0.217	0.395		248	304.69	66.13	54.32	120.46
31-32	1.067	0.188	0.383		248	264.53	49.60	51.67	101.27
32-33	0.844	0.152	0.391		248	209.32	31.85	50.06	81.91

The ratio of goals to assists is completely off, but the point totals fit right in with expectations. Even then, look at Pavel Bure's 99-00 in comparison to Morenz' 28-29 season.

Year	% LA	G%	P%		LA GF	New GF	Goals	Assists	Points
99-00	1.084	0.238	0.385		248	268.94	63.93	39.68	103.61

Basically the exact same year, in terms of percentages, 70 years apart. However, their point totals are completely different - Morenz played 42 games and had 17 goals and 10 assists for 27 points, while Bure played 74 games and had 58 goals and 36 assists for 94 points. In the same scoring environment, about a point apart, but functionally identical.

[As an aside, after the mid-30s, I'm not that convinced secondary assists are that undercounted for forwards. Maurice Richard averaged 0.16 secondary assists/game, Bobby Hull 0.18, and Alex Ovechkin 0.19. If you gave Richard Ovechkin's A2/G over his career, that would lead to just about 27 extra assists over 978 games and 18 seasons, or 1.5 assists per year.]

Also Mike, I'd like to revise a couple of my statements in light of your responses - the Howe/Beliveau birth year comparison was bad, I was more referring to the lack of impact talent aside from them that debuted between the war and 54-55. You look at Calder voting, and it's a bunch of players who topped out as 2nd liners, if that. Here might be a better way to visualize it - skaters that played 500 games, goalies who played 100 games, by birth year:

	Skater	Goalie
1920	2	2
1921	2	0
1922	7	0
1923	4	0
1924	2	2
1925	7	0
1926	3	3
1927	8	0
1928	4	0
1929	6	3
1930	4	0
1931	12	2
1932	10	2
1933	10	2
1934	3	1
1935	9	1
1936	11	0
1937	5	1
1938	10	2
1939	9	2
1940	15	3

Reached double digits in 8 of the 10 years between 31-40, did not reach double in any year before that. Is there a pattern in the 1920s that corresponds to specific years being disrupted by Depression/WW2? Do benchmarks need to be set differently from 500 games/100 games to give an accurate count?

Further, to clarify on the defensemen, I know standing defensemen up at the blue line in a structured trap is still a thing. I was more referring to the practice of the 2 D-men standing at their own blue line while their team had the puck in the offensive zone. Even with the rules constraints of the day, I'm sure modern skaters could come up with breakouts that would absolutely shred even modern defensemen who were forced to defend rushes from a starting point of standing at their own blue line.

 

[daver]

We've used staying power as a proxy for league quality. Guys putting up 90 points in 1980 are out of the league a few years later (the Blair MacDonald rule).

Is there a thread discussing this? Blair MacDonald doesn't seem like a good example considering only 18 of his 90 points were not shared with Wayne. Perhaps he was a borderline NHLers to begin with without Wayne.

And if the quality of the league is deemed to have shown as showing a significant increase from 1980 onwards based on the # of players leaving in the years afterwards, how much of this can be attributed to the four WHL teams joining and the league needing a few years to cut through the chaff?

The point totals of the league best best player do not seem affected by the increase in quality i.e. a Top 5 in scoring in 1985 isn't automatically better than a Top 5 in 1980.

 

[VanIslander]

He was no Nighbor. But he was close.

 

[daver]

Everyone here is always looking for shorthanded methods to evaluate things...you can probably see that things started to heal by 1948 and as we got into the early 50's, the league was probably quite good looking at goals per game averages...

A fair assessment. A fair assessment of Richard's 50 goal season sees a couple more players closer to him than Cain was and likely a total lower than 50 but still one of the most dominant goalscoring seasons ever.

What are your thoughts on Richard's dominant goalscoring title in 50/51 or his two additional titles at age 32 and 33? And his continued goalscoring dominance in the playoffs despite being past his peak.

 

[JackSlater]

No one here (or elsewhere)can do much more than ballpark how good Morenz was. He played in a very different league and no one here has seen him play, outside of maybe a clip here or there. One of the best players of his time, and that's about it.

I really don't think WWII has as big an impact on hockey as @Michael Farkas Farkas thinks it did. Sure, the NHL (and presumably lesser leagues) were downgraded noticeably in 1943-44 and 1944-45 (and in some cases, as early as 1942-43, such as the "Kraut line" famously... but mainly those final two seasons of the war).

But hockey was -- by massive margins -- the dominant sport / pastime in Canada by the 1940s. Why would the development of young talent be greatly impacted? The young talent was at home, praticing hockey, just the same as it ever was. To my knowledge, it's not like hockey rinks closed up shop during the war.

Then, in the NHL itself, there were only 16-17 players per club, and six clubs from 1942-1945. So, each of the final three wartime seasons, there were about 105 full-time NHL jobs available (maybe 135 total, including replacement players, part-timers, taxi-squaders, etc). That means, even before the war, there was presumably a lot of good talent at the minor-pro level, waiting in the wings.

Even if 1/5 of the NHL players were away for wartime purpose each season (and I don't think it was that many), that means only 21 replacement players were in the League at any given time, for about three years. This doesn't strike me as any cause for the NHL to experience any massive drop in quality of play, outside of the two or three clubs (certainly Boston, maybe another?) that experienced a larger-than-average loss of high impact players. Those couple of clubs were obviously impacted in the short-term, but that doesn't mean the overall quality of NHL hockey greatly suffered, or that it couldn't immediately recover post-war.

And, as mentioned, I simply don't see how the development of talent / players (occuring almost entirely in Canada) would be seriously affected by wartime conditions. I could be wrong about this, but I don't see why it would be a thing. Thus, i can see maybe 1945-46 also being a season noticeably impacted by the fallout of the war, but beyond that...? I don't see it.

I find it very strange that you hold to these claims about WW2 over the years despite participating in various threads where the topic has been beaten to death. Obviously the NHL had more than 1/5 of its players missing due to WW2. Here is the number of players missing that deemed NHL regulars (played over 50% of their team's games in the previous season) during the latter years of WW2:

1942: 5
1943: 43
1944: 30
1945: 7

There are a few other things to consider - Brooklyn folded after 1942, a small number of players returned by 1945, the AHL was also hit by players disappearing due to WW2 (not sure the numbers), and some young players would have made the NHL anyway. Still in 1944 you had 78 players who had recently been regular NHLers missing from the league - that's far more than 50% of a six team league, better yet only 20%, even if we accept that some regulars could have dropped out of the league over two years regardless of WW2. To emphasize that - in 1944 there ere exactly 78 players who played 50% of the games that season, and only 151 played even a single game. Even 1943 gets hand waved away but going into 1943 the NHL lost 8 hall of fames, 13 players who had or would be post season all stars, and three of the league's starting goaltenders from the previous season.

As for the league after WW2, it should be obvious that the biggest disruption Canadian society had ever faced would disrupt hockey development for a few years. The Macleans article isn't seemingly free online anymore (Montreal's Grey-Flannel Hockey Cartel, 1960) but Frank Selke commented on it at the time: "I realized that young players in the services would not return to hockey as probable stars. The years that would have improved their ability were being spent in the army."

 

[Michael Farkas]

A fair assessment. A fair assessment of Richard's 50 goal season sees a couple more players closer to him than Cain was and likely a total lower than 50 but still one of the most dominant goalscoring seasons ever.

What are your thoughts on Richard's dominant goalscoring title in 50/51 or his two additional titles at age 32 and 33? And his continued goalscoring dominance in the playoffs despite being past his peak.

I'm not captivated by his 50 in 50 season. But I also think he's probably the most technically skilled player in the history of the game up to and through 1950. He deserves full fare - as I see it today - for the early 50's stuff. It makes sense that he's the best goal scorer.

I didn't make the connection until yesterday when I watched him get clobbered by Ted Kennedy - who should have easily been in his periphery at worst - that he was basically Lindros before Lindros. If Lindros didn't have to deal with steroid-era piano movers, maybe things go fairly similarly. Richard was physically hard to stop. His vision and overall hockey sense do not impress at all relative to other all time greats.

I'm down - versus the field - on one-way, one-dimensional wingers. And I don't mean to be reductive, but you'd think the alleged best player of all time through, say, 1960 or whatever...you'd think you'd be able to lead the league in points somehow along the way, right? You played probably four or five good years against a league that it looks like I could have played in. Then you also played on a dynasty.

But that's the drawback of guys that aren't multi-dimensional players. They don't produce as much. Really strong right leg, really weak left leg (I don't know, I don't follow soccer). So as much as I'm a "talent" guy and as much as think this is probably the most technically skilled player for a large chunk of hockey history...he's not close to a top 10 player.

But anyhow, full freight for the goal scoring seasons in the 50's, and I don't think we should ignore what he did before that either...but I'm not giving full credit for that mess.

 

[Michael Farkas]

Re: The Panther's thing. Look, I don't like to leave questions or comments unanswered. I really like to engage in the conversation. But do I really have to spend any time sourcing this at all (beyond what Jack Slater put together already)?

Like...there's no one else that's close to having that opinion, right? All the stats, all the players, the senior amateur league (think Quebec Aces, etc.) getting ransacked, players getting loaned to other NHL teams to avoid being ousted from the league, the film that we have, the rinks that closed to become aircraft construction outfits, the absolute bananas things that happened in the NHL (much less lower leagues) in that time (3-0 comeback, the 15-0 game, first 20-goal season (until Orr) by a defenseman - who was out of the league two years later, etc.).

I'm open to hearing a lot of stuff...but this is so far beyond reproach statistically, contemporary accounts (Hap Day's "Children's Hour" line), film, just pure roster review (the Rangers were 1st in 1942 and then I think they lost like 19 players and had to borrow guys from Montreal's farm to stay afloat, they didn't recover from that for a generation)...

If this actually needs to be discussed, let's find an old thread...but I just can't imagine that we need to go down this road...

 

[The Panther]

No one here (or elsewhere)can do much more than ballpark how good Morenz was. He played in a very different league and no one here has seen him play, outside of maybe a clip here or there. One of the best players of his time, and that's about it.



I find it very strange that you hold to these claims about WW2 over the years despite participating in various threads where the topic has been beaten to death. Obviously the NHL had more than 1/5 of its players missing due to WW2. Here is the number of players missing that deemed NHL regulars (played over 50% of their team's games in the previous season) during the latter years of WW2:

1942: 5
1943: 43
1944: 30
1945: 7

There are a few other things to consider - Brooklyn folded after 1942, a small number of players returned by 1945, the AHL was also hit by players disappearing due to WW2 (not sure the numbers), and some young players would have made the NHL anyway. Still in 1944 you had 78 players who had recently been regular NHLers missing from the league - that's far more than 50% of a six team league, better yet only 20%, even if we accept that some regulars could have dropped out of the league over two years regardless of WW2. To emphasize that - in 1944 there ere exactly 78 players who played 50% of the games that season, and only 151 played even a single game. Even 1943 gets hand waved away but going into 1943 the NHL lost 8 hall of fames, 13 players who had or would be post season all stars, and three of the league's starting goaltenders from the previous season.

As for the league after WW2, it should be obvious that the biggest disruption Canadian society had ever faced would disrupt hockey development for a few years. The Macleans article isn't seemingly free online anymore (Montreal's Grey-Flannel Hockey Cartel, 1960) but Frank Selke commented on it at the time: "I realized that young players in the services would not return to hockey as probable stars. The years that would have improved their ability were being spent in the army."

Thanks for posting those numbers (assuming they're accurate), which are fascinating. I've seriously never seen those before, so if you (or another poster) presented them in another thread, I've never seen them.

(One thing that might mitigate those numbers a bit is if the 1944 and 1945 numbers are themselves influenced by "replacement" players from the preceding season. That is, if a minor leaguer suddenly became a major leaguer during 1943-44, but then went to war in 1944, he'd be added to your list when he wasn't really a proper "NHL-er" in the first place. But anyway...)

My point, though, was not about the quality of NHL play during the 1942-45 period, whicih, as I stated, was clearly affected by loss of players (particularly a couple of clubs). My point was more about the development path of talent. Despite what Frank Selke says, I don't think the loss of a few players here or there would have affected the entire style of play or "quality" of the NHL during the 1945-50 period. I just don't see it.

 

[JackSlater]

Thanks for posting those numbers (assuming they're accurate), which are fascinating. I've seriously never seen those before, so if you (or another poster) presented them in another thread, I've never seen them.

(One thing that might mitigate those numbers a bit is if the 1944 and 1945 numbers are themselves influenced by "replacement" players from the preceding season. That is, if a minor leaguer suddenly became a major leaguer during 1943-44, but then went to war in 1944, he'd be added to your list when he wasn't really a proper "NHL-er" in the first place. But anyway...)

My point, though, was not about the quality of NHL play during the 1942-45 period, whicih, as I stated, was clearly affected by loss of players (particularly a couple of clubs). My point was more about the development path of talent. Despite what Frank Selke says, I don't think the loss of a few players here or there would have affected the entire style of play or "quality" of the NHL during the 1945-50 period. I just don't see it.

I did those years ago by just looking at the players who played 50% of the games one season and then didn't play the next season and just checked whether they were on a military affiliated team the next year (usually it is noted somewhere) or if I could find record somewhere else. You "liked" the post in fact. If I found nothing I didn't count them. I recall that another poster found a website that listed NHLers who participated in WW2 and it was largely the same players, but not broken down by when they left. Roughly four years ago there were two concurrent threads dealing with pretty much the same topic regarding WW2. There is one missing piece that I can't find if I posted or saved it somewhere but I believe slightly more players returned from military service than left the NHL for military service in 1945. 1944 is the most hard hit season. I agree that some minor leaguers showed up and then shipped out, but it still conveys the weakness of the NHL and said minor leaguer did at least play most of an NHL season by my calculation.

It isn't the point of the thread really so I won't post on it again here, but I don't see how anyone would expect the NHL to just snap right back to shape just because WW2 ended. You had various players who hadn't played a meaningful game in years in many cases rejoining the league, and young players who should have been developing in the NHL who missed out on that chance. You also have young men who went over there and were actually in combat, as opposed to what the typical NHLer was doing, and never got the chance to develop properly. For younger players they would have lost out on some of the older competition/guidance that would assist in their development. That doesn't mean that players couldn't develop... Doug Harvey was in the navy for years before he ever played an NHL game. Lots of potentially quality NHLers are not as good as Harvey though, and even Harvey may have hit his stride earlier if he wasn't playing on a navy team at 18 and 19 and then spending his 20th year sailing across the Atlantic Ocean on active duty.