Top 10 over the course of a career certainly is worthy of the HHOF. What is the difference in defensive effect from 10th best to the best in any given year? I'd hazard it isn't that much.
Top 10 in Selke voting
without cracking the top 3 is pretty weak from a HHOF standpoint. Over the past few years that has been Joel Eriksson Ek, or Phillip Danault. Good defenders, but not guys you could ever see making any sort of argument for the Hall on that basis (though never say never… when players retire we get these threads).
Part of it is simply that the Selke gives everyone 5 votes, and everyone thinks their hometown player deserves a vote, so they get spread around a lot. A guy like Adam Lowry can make a “top 10 Selke” argument. That’s why it’s relevant that Elias didn’t crack the top 10 outside of a single 8th place finish — if he had been the defender that some are selling him as, then he would have had
some support on that ballot, if only from local writers. Instead those writers routinely voted for Elias’ own teammates instead. Hence “Selke caliber” being a serious over-sell of the player he actually was.
That’s great to know, but you’re not on the selection committee, are you? It’s clear you think the HOF standards should be higher, and that’s a fair opinion. It is, however, just not reality based of precedent.
Again, I can sit here and observe Guy Carbonneau and Kevin Lowe in the HHOF. That doesn’t make them HHOF caliber players, it just means they golf with the right guys. We don’t need to hold them as permanent precedent for what a HHOF’er looks like just because their buddies gave them an unearned honor.
Firstly, it's an award that is almost exclusively given to centers, so the writers aren't usually thinking of wingers when giving the award. In 2001, Elias got more Selke votes than any other winger not named Jere Lehtinen. This despite his own teammate (John Madden) winning the award and Holik finishing right behind him (so they were both likely stealing votes from any homer Devils writers). Which brings me to my next point - the Devils had several elite defensive forwards on the team during Elias's prime, so him not getting tons of homer votes isn't shocking.
Centers get those votes for a reason. Wingers objectively have less defensive impact by nature of their position on the ice.
To your second point, unless you are saying that the Devils had more “Selke caliber” forwards than the entire rest of the league combined (in which case we need to adjust Martin Brodeur’s legacy accordingly, so tread lightly here) then Elias wasn’t losing votes to his teammates.
I also don't tend to put a lot of faith into a voting base made Mitch Marner a Selke finalist in 2023 over guys like Jordan Staal and Anze Kopitar
I mean, 2023 is the era of advanced stats and the hypothesis upthread is that Elias would have been better recognized in this era because of improved information accuracy. Inherent in this logic is Marner>Kopitar, which is part of the reason I don’t buy the logic in the first place.
Guys who score 1000+ points with multiple top 10 scoring finishes and multiple cups don't need to be Patrice Bergeron to get into the Hall of Fame. But it certainly helps to be an elite defensive winger, and he certainly was.
Perhaps, but it’s the Theo Fleury tier of candidates who don’t necessarily get in either.
Your general opinion of Elias seems to be quite a lot lower than that of the hockey community.
For example, in the last Top 60 Wingers project (from 2014), the History of Hockey Board ranked Elias the 45th best winger of all-time.
This is the final list of the top wingers from all of hockey history, as determined by the History of Hockey community at HFBoards: RankPlayerHeightWeightBornDiedCareerNationality 1Gordie Howe6'0"205192820161946-1980Canada 2Bobby Hull5'10"1951939 1957-1980Canada 3Maurice Richard5'10"1701921...
forums.hfboards.com
That's quite high. That puts him ahead of a number of wingers who have been inducted into the Hall in the last 35 or so years.
None of Steve Shutt, Bill Barber, Glenn Anderson, Joe Mullen. Lanny McDonald, Dick Duff, Clark Gillies, Dino Ciccarelli, Dave Andreychuk, Cam Neely or Mike Gartner made that list at all. All those wingers are in the Hall of Fame. Elias placed a couple of slots ahead of Alfredsson and ahead of Rod Gilbert, who are Hall of Famers as well.
Now there's a good chance Marleau will be inducted (he holds the games played record). Elias is definitely better than Marleau.
The point is that if you can quite easily rhyme off more than ten wingers who are in the Hall and inferior to Elias, there is a good chance the people who do the inductions will select him and he won't stand out as a particularly weak or terrible selection. He'll be more or less status quo for a winger.
Yes, I was a voter on that list. I just read back over a couple of the old threads (those were good debates!) and what strikes me in retrospect is that Elias was one of the bigger risers on that list despite hardly even being discussed. Those who remember that project would agree that the discussion was intensive and it was unusual for a player to be added to the list without real discussion. That’s not to say he didn’t deserve the placement, but it was odd.
But I do take your point, and
@Hockey Outsider ’s above, that there is a broader category of wingers like Anderson, McDonald, Mullen who somehow make it into the Hall despite not really having been true “stars” in their own era. We’re probably going to see Marleau and Backstrom go into the Hall from this era, even though you could probably name 20 bigger stars from the 2010s. It happens and Elias would not be nearly the worst of those if he were in (see Carbonneau, Lowe above). So I do see where he’s likely to make it in eventually based on the “if X then Y” game.
tarheel,
you seem to be a good poster from what i've read from you over the years on the main board but i'm starting to wonder about your fixation on going on about this elias discussion.
it's a bit strange in my opinion
cheers man
Fixation?
I’m just responding to posts directed at me. It’s August and this is one of the few active topics on HF, what else would I be here for?
