Is The Younger, More Dynamic Yzerman A Forgotten Player?

[JackSlater]

i think all of this is true

but i also think the young dynamic yzerman was overrated, partially because of how dynamic he was, and that it took a while to get over the cognitive dissonance of sakic being on that level

when i started watching, starting 1989 but not really figuring out who was who and what was what until around '91, there was gretzky and mario, then there was yzerman, then there was everybody else. for a long time, there was this idea that in the late 80s/early 90s, if there was no gretzky or mario, yzerman would be winning multiple art ross and hart trophies.

but then you look back and obviously 1989 was a very special year. but while he was extremely competitive in his '88 to '93 offensive peak, in no other year of that stretch was he head and shoulders above the pack.

'88 was yzerman's breakout year and he finishes fourth for the hart trophy. but statistically, he's behind denis savard in per game scoring and falls out of the top ten in actual points because he missed 16 games

in 1990, he's right there with peak messier (two points back). that's very good, obviously, but again he's not head and shoulders above the pack

'91 was a bit of a dud year from him. "only" 7th in scoring, including behind a 21 year old sakic

'92 was more of the same, 7th again, tied with young breakout roenick

then back up to the big boys in '93, with a very strong 4th place between career statistical years by oates and turgeon/selanne

which is to say, i think peak yzerman as a scoring force was closer to the stastny/savard/hawerchuk group than we thought at the time, but for 1989.

meanwhile, sakic kind of snuck up on you. he finally broke out as a creme de la creme top scorer in '95, but it got a little swept under the radar because it was the lockout year. then after his magical 1996 season, he has a handful of injured years, before reemerging with another magical september to may tour de force in 2001. and i think especially because '97 and '98 were kind of down years for him made us not fully appreciate how elite his injury-abbreviated '99 and 2000 were. and i think it really wasn't until the older sakic hitting 100 in 2007 when a lot of people looked back and were like, whoa you know what, this is maybe a top 30-40 all time career.

i'm agnostic on sakic vs yzerman but this is my feel on the ebbs and flows of the 19 vs 19 debate.

That seems like an accurate enough representation of the general discussion. A lot of it also comes down to their defensive play at peak as well, with people trying to figure out if Yzerman was adequate or terrible (the Bowman narrative) at the time and Sakic benefitting from the Selke changing to a two-way trophy by the 2000s. I'll add that I think that Yzerman was the clear best offensive player for at least three seasons, from 1988-1990, in a way that was more clear at the time. It sort of reminds me of the way MacKinnon has been regarded over the last few years, which won't make sense to someone looking back in 20 years.

I've generally seen Yzerman ranked above Sakic in general in the hockey world/media, on HFBoards and here, of course, given the way things are evaluated, Sakic seems to be more often ranked ahead, but I don't think that's generally the case outside.

I've never thought Sakic was the right comparable to Yzerman in the first place. I get why the comparison is made, due the some superficial similarities (captains, same number, born in British Columbia, quiet personalities, etc) during the Wings-Avs rivalry years, but like even in demeanor or what is said to be leadership style, it seems to me that say Lidstrom or Zetterberg were better comparable to Sakic than the more vocal Yzerman himself. Certainly in playstyle the two were different enough.

It's interesting that Sakic didn't get compared to Yzerman too much in the early nineties. Yzerman usually got compared to Gretzky and Lemieux themselves, or otherwise, what I consider to be the closest stylistic comparison, LaFontaine. Even then it isn't a perfect comparison, LaFontaine more of a straight ahead speed guy, low to the ground, whereas Yzerman would weave more, but at least both generally drove to the net with a frequency that Sakic didn't for example. Like Jagr said, Yzerman was one of a kind in the way he moved.

Here's a fun article from the St. Louis media on Hull and Yzerman, with the basketball comparisons. Aside from Gretzky and Lemieux, what can be more flattering than comparisons with Jordan stylistically?

View attachment 501503



Well scoring placements and the like will never really capture all that much. To use another player as an example, why is it that as early as the late eighties, LaFontaine is already considered to be among the best players in the world? To the point that he is mentioned among a very select few others (Lemieux, Yzerman, Messier, Bourque, Savard) in Gretzky's entry in the Hockey Scouting Report after 1989-1990 as one of the players who can be considered the best on any given night. His numbers are pretty low, there are several other forwards who have more points than him that he is considered better than, he only broke 100 points once with the Islanders. The thing was, at the time, it was given that LaFontaine was a man on an island in Long Island, he had probably the least help of any superstar of that period, and it wasn't surprising to many that he broke out in such a way when he went to Buffalo. Today you see how the hockey world and media rank LaFontaine, which doesn't jive with the way players are evaluated here, so it becomes a point of criticism. I find Fedorov often getting similar treatment nowadays, by people who maybe didn't watch too much of him and just go by stats, and I just have to shake my head... as if Fedorov couldn't have scored much more had he played somewhere else and not in Detroit during his prime lol

Yzerman same sort of story. Looking at his points together stats, of that era, aside from Islanders LaFontaine, who would be said to have less help/consistency with linemates?

Then there is Yzerman's powerplay scoring, which generally lagged quite a bit behind other superstars of the day? Why so low? Well earlier in the late eighties, when Yzerman played most of the powerplay, the Wings were pretty low in terms of powerplay opportunities, when the Wings had a ton of talent and started getting more powerplay opportunities and had a powerhouse powerplay, Yzerman split time and didn't play with Fedorov (in 1992-1993 the Wings scored 113 powerplay goals, Yzerman was on the ice for only 61 of them, he scored 41 points with only 3 powerplay points shared with Fedorov, when most of the other top scorers had 50-60 on less prolific powerplays).

Yzerman sometimes gets said to have inflated numbers since he played in the Norris division. Turns out, he scores less against the Norris than he does against the other divisions, until in the early nineties, by which time, the Norris is probably the best division in the league.

His even strength scoring, and especially road even strength scoring are really remarkable. He sees very little drop (and in some cases increases) on the road as compared to home, and makes it look a lot closer to Gretzky and Lemieux in points and Brett Hull in goals.

Eyeballing things, he seems to depend less on blowout goals and points for his scoring than most of his contemporaries, and he scores really well against the best defensive teams like Montreal and Boston. As Gerard Gallant said, Yzerman never cared about getting 50 goals or 100 points or individual milestones, he played to win and did what he had to do and it really shows in the numbers.

In the early nineties, Yzerman already had to share the icetime/scoring opportunities with what was considered to be the deepest team at center with Fedorov and Carson (this is called out in the Yzerman/Hull Jordan/Bird article as well).

I don't think it's as simple as saying something like Yzerman only lost out one scoring title to Gretzky and Lemieux, so he wasn't clearly the best offensive player aside from them. All of the underlying numbers strongly suggest his numbers, far from being inflated, were likely deflated compared to other superstars.

This also gives a good, more detailed general idea. I don't even know if it's all true but it matches my thoughts of Yzerman at that time. This is my favourite player though so who knows, I might just be out to lunch.

 

[The Panther]

Looking at 1987-88, 1988-89, and 1989-90, I think 3rd-best-forward is a toss-up between Mark Messier and Steve Yzerman.

The stats' comparison (fall 1987 to spring 1990) shows:

Yzerman:
177G + 207A = 384PTS (+41)
Messier:
115G + 219A = 334PTS (+35)

Yzerman (oddly) takes the '89 Pearson, while Mess takes the '90 Hart and Pearson. Messier's advantage here is that his career season (1989-90) occurred with Lemieux and Gretzky having down years, while Yzerman scored 155 points the year prior but finished third in scoring! Offensively, Yzerman is notably ahead in even-strength scoring compared to Mess.

For those three seasons, would anyone else be on the radar as third best forward? (Bernie Nicholls actually falls in between Yzerman and Messier in scoring.) I don't think anyone else would.

 

[86Habs]

i think all of this is true

but i also think the young dynamic yzerman was overrated, partially because of how dynamic he was, and that it took a while to get over the cognitive dissonance of sakic being on that level

when i started watching, starting 1989 but not really figuring out who was who and what was what until around '91, there was gretzky and mario, then there was yzerman, then there was everybody else. for a long time, there was this idea that in the late 80s/early 90s, if there was no gretzky or mario, yzerman would be winning multiple art ross and hart trophies.

but then you look back and obviously 1989 was a very special year. but while he was extremely competitive in his '88 to '93 offensive peak, in no other year of that stretch was he head and shoulders above the pack.

'88 was yzerman's breakout year and he finishes fourth for the hart trophy. but statistically, he's behind denis savard in per game scoring and falls out of the top ten in actual points because he missed 16 games

in 1990, he's right there with peak messier (two points back). that's very good, obviously, but again he's not head and shoulders above the pack

'91 was a bit of a dud year from him. "only" 7th in scoring, including behind a 21 year old sakic

'92 was more of the same, 7th again, tied with young breakout roenick

then back up to the big boys in '93, with a very strong 4th place between career statistical years by oates and turgeon/selanne

which is to say, i think peak yzerman as a scoring force was closer to the stastny/savard/hawerchuk group than we thought at the time, but for 1989.

meanwhile, sakic kind of snuck up on you. he finally broke out as a creme de la creme top scorer in '95, but it got a little swept under the radar because it was the lockout year. then after his magical 1996 season, he has a handful of injured years, before reemerging with another magical september to may tour de force in 2001. and i think especially because '97 and '98 were kind of down years for him made us not fully appreciate how elite his injury-abbreviated '99 and 2000 were. and i think it really wasn't until the older sakic hitting 100 in 2007 when a lot of people looked back and were like, whoa you know what, this is maybe a top 30-40 all time career.

i'm agnostic on sakic vs yzerman but this is my feel on the ebbs and flows of the 19 vs 19 debate.

I feel like maybe you're selling peak Yzerman a little short. If the "pack" is anyone aside from Gretzky and Lemieux, during the 1987-1988 to 1989-1990 seasons, he picks up at least one Hart (1989) and maybe two (depending on how one feels about Fuhr in a hypothetical non-Gretzky NHL), a 1st Team All-Star nod and two 2nd-Team All-Star nods, a scoring title (1989), and a 2nd place Art Ross finish in 1990, when he's 2 points behind Messier and 14 points ahead of Hull. I feel like that's adequate separation from the "pack", being Hawerchuk, Savard, and Lafontaine in certain of those seasons. Messier is part of the pack too, of course, but personally I have no issue saying that Messier was the more valuable or "better" player during that timeframe. From 1990-1991 to 1992-1993, he picks up another top-3 scoring finish (1993) and another top-5 finish (1992, excluding a Mario-fueled Stevens). That's really good. Only towards the end of that period did adequate help arrive in Detroit, and as we all know in the late 1980s Yzerman didn't have much help at all (contrasting that to Sakic, who during his peak had an incredibly strong/quasi #1 center in Forsberg who took the brunt of the toughest defensive matchups, and who typically had help from at least reasonably strong linemates).

I dunno, my recollection at the time (I feel like we're roughly the same age...early 40s?) was that Yzerman was the 3rd or 4th best forward in the league, behind Gretzky, Lemieux, and probably Messier, and in the elite group of players in the league including Bourque and Roy (and maybe Coffey). Hawerchuk and Savard were great players but we're falling off a little at the end of the '80s, Yzerman was almost always ahead of Lafontaine, and Hull and Oates were rightfully seen as more one-dimensional than Yzerman, who was the complete package offensively. Yzerman was fun to watch too, had some personality, and was admittedly a good-looking guy in front of the cameras. And of course there is this (Gretzky was the other):

 

[vadim sharifijanov]

Well scoring placements and the like will never really capture all that much. To use another player as an example, why is it that as early as the late eighties, LaFontaine is already considered to be among the best players in the world? To the point that he is mentioned among a very select few others (Lemieux, Yzerman, Messier, Bourque, Savard) in Gretzky's entry in the Hockey Scouting Report after 1989-1990 as one of the players who can be considered the best on any given night. His numbers are pretty low, there are several other forwards who have more points than him that he is considered better than, he only broke 100 points once with the Islanders. The thing was, at the time, it was given that LaFontaine was a man on an island in Long Island, he had probably the least help of any superstar of that period, and it wasn't surprising to many that he broke out in such a way when he went to Buffalo. Today you see how the hockey world and media rank LaFontaine, which doesn't jive with the way players are evaluated here, so it becomes a point of criticism. I find Fedorov often getting similar treatment nowadays, by people who maybe didn't watch too much of him and just go by stats, and I just have to shake my head... as if Fedorov couldn't have scored much more had he played somewhere else and not in Detroit during his prime lol

Yzerman same sort of story. Looking at his points together stats, of that era, aside from Islanders LaFontaine, who would be said to have less help/consistency with linemates?

Then there is Yzerman's powerplay scoring, which generally lagged quite a bit behind other superstars of the day? Why so low? Well earlier in the late eighties, when Yzerman played most of the powerplay, the Wings were pretty low in terms of powerplay opportunities, when the Wings had a ton of talent and started getting more powerplay opportunities and had a powerhouse powerplay, Yzerman split time and didn't play with Fedorov (in 1992-1993 the Wings scored 113 powerplay goals, Yzerman was on the ice for only 61 of them, he scored 41 points with only 3 powerplay points shared with Fedorov, when most of the other top scorers had 50-60 on less prolific powerplays).

Yzerman sometimes gets said to have inflated numbers since he played in the Norris division. Turns out, he scores less against the Norris than he does against the other divisions, until in the early nineties, by which time, the Norris is probably the best division in the league.

His even strength scoring, and especially road even strength scoring are really remarkable. He sees very little drop (and in some cases increases) on the road as compared to home, and makes it look a lot closer to Gretzky and Lemieux in points and Brett Hull in goals.

Eyeballing things, he seems to depend less on blowout goals and points for his scoring than most of his contemporaries, and he scores really well against the best defensive teams like Montreal and Boston. As Gerard Gallant said, Yzerman never cared about getting 50 goals or 100 points or individual milestones, he played to win and did what he had to do and it really shows in the numbers.

In the early nineties, Yzerman already had to share the icetime/scoring opportunities with what was considered to be the deepest team at center with Fedorov and Carson (this is called out in the Yzerman/Hull Jordan/Bird article as well).

I don't think it's as simple as saying something like Yzerman only lost out one scoring title to Gretzky and Lemieux, so he wasn't clearly the best offensive player aside from them. All of the underlying numbers strongly suggest his numbers, far from being inflated, were likely deflated compared to other superstars.

That do feel revisionist history it is true, there was a debate at the time was he the third best player (was it Messier, Roy, Bourque or Yzerman, etc...), but he was the clear third best offensive player of that era, separating himself from the rest of the pack quite well I think in that regard.

That seems like an accurate enough representation of the general discussion. A lot of it also comes down to their defensive play at peak as well, with people trying to figure out if Yzerman was adequate or terrible (the Bowman narrative) at the time and Sakic benefitting from the Selke changing to a two-way trophy by the 2000s. I'll add that I think that Yzerman was the clear best offensive player for at least three seasons, from 1988-1990, in a way that was more clear at the time. It sort of reminds me of the way MacKinnon has been regarded over the last few years, which won't make sense to someone looking back in 20 years.

I feel like maybe you're selling peak Yzerman a little short. If the "pack" is anyone aside from Gretzky and Lemieux, during the 1987-1988 to 1989-1990 seasons, he picks up at least one Hart (1989) and maybe two (depending on how one feels about Fuhr in a hypothetical non-Gretzky NHL), a 1st Team All-Star nod and two 2nd-Team All-Star nods, a scoring title (1989), and a 2nd place Art Ross finish in 1990, when he's 2 points behind Messier and 14 points ahead of Hull. I feel like that's adequate separation from the "pack", being Hawerchuk, Savard, and Lafontaine in certain of those seasons. Messier is part of the pack too, of course, but personally I have no issue saying that Messier was the more valuable or "better" player during that timeframe. From 1990-1991 to 1992-1993, he picks up another top-3 scoring finish (1993) and another top-5 finish (1992, excluding a Mario-fueled Stevens). That's really good. Only towards the end of that period did adequate help arrive in Detroit, and as we all know in the late 1980s Yzerman didn't have much help at all (contrasting that to Sakic, who during his peak had an incredibly strong/quasi #1 center in Forsberg who took the brunt of the toughest defensive matchups, and who typically had help from at least reasonably strong linemates).

I dunno, my recollection at the time (I feel like we're roughly the same age...early 40s?) was that Yzerman was the 3rd or 4th best forward in the league, behind Gretzky, Lemieux, and probably Messier, and in the elite group of players in the league including Bourque and Roy (and maybe Coffey). Hawerchuk and Savard were great players but we're falling off a little at the end of the '80s, Yzerman was almost always ahead of Lafontaine, and Hull and Oates were rightfully seen as more one-dimensional than Yzerman, who was the complete package offensively. Yzerman was fun to watch too, had some personality, and was admittedly a good-looking guy in front of the cameras.

interesting discussion everyone. and it's also not lost to me that i'm doing exactly what jackslater was talking about: "looking at Sakic's superior number of top ten scoring placements (for example) . . . over time the players get forgotten and people are just left comparing resume bullet points."

re: yzerman and the pack, '88 to '90, i certainly agree that over those three seasons as a whole yzerman was far and away the third best offensive player. but i guess i'd have to be convinced that there was clear separation between '88 yzerman and '88 savard and '90 yzerman and '90 messier to say he was the clear #3 the entire time, again speaking purely about scoring ability not overall game which i think is a whole other can of worms.

the lafontaine comparison brought up above several times is interesting. why was lafontaine considered a creme de la creme offensive player in 1990? because he had just had his breakthrough season, which people had been waiting on for half a decade. and i do wonder whether what is instructive about 1990 lafontaine relates to 1988 yzerman's share of the hart voting. as in, did yzerman get bonus points for being a visually flashy player in a breakout year (vs savard and hawerchuk)? and maybe more significantly, did yzerman get bonus points for scoring so much on such a bad team?

that last part is interesting to me because we now think of being the long guy on an awful team in two different ways. either you are a hero and doing the lord's work all by yourself with no help (rookie hawerchuk, dead wings yzerman, 1990 lafontaine, 1998 selanne, 2002 iginla), so we project more points in the place of the "help" you don't have, or we contextualize your numbers by arguing that you had an inflated share of scoring opportunities because there was no one else fit to carry the puck (florida bure, kovalchuk in the car crash year, i think andy bathgate also tends to get this tag). i distinctly remember reading an article about lafontaine in the 1990 season saying he was the real MVP because he was so high in scoring with randy wood and derek king as his wingers. we might therefore also want to look at lafontaine's 5th place in 1990, ahead of 127 point yzerman, in the same light as yzerman's 4th place in 1988, ahead of 131 point savard.

none of this is to say that yzerman wasn't better than the savard/hawerchuk pack, because i think 1989 shows that his ceiling was higher than theirs. and yzerman being the clear best offensive player is certainly how i remember the temperature of the room back then. i'm just trying to place a little scrutiny on that received wisdom, especially given that he went from #3/4 scorer when it was him and gerard gallant to the bottom of the top ten in '91 and '92 when fedorov arrived. i wonder if his true level in a vacuum would have been something in between, which imo would be as squarely the best guy in the stastny/savard/hawerchuk/lafontaine/oates pack.

I've never thought Sakic was the right comparable to Yzerman in the first place. I get why the comparison is made, due the some superficial similarities (captains, same number, born in British Columbia, quiet personalities, etc) during the Wings-Avs rivalry years, but like even in demeanor or what is said to be leadership style, it seems to me that say Lidstrom or Zetterberg were better comparable to Sakic than the more vocal Yzerman himself. Certainly in playstyle the two were different enough.

i think other than the number and the birthplace (and the birthplace is kind of a canard because yzerman grew up in ottawa), i think the real substance of the comparison is both weathered some truly awful early years on a franchise that was scraping the bottom of the barrel, were made captain at very young ages, and then grew into lifetime organizational pillars.

 

[MadLuke]

yzerman and the pack, '88 to '90, i certainly agree that over those three seasons as a whole yzerman was far and away the third best offensive player.

I think you got it, some of the other humans could have a peak year and beat him (like it happen to pretty much any non Gretzky type of players), but he was overall the third best one cleanly imo during is offensive prime of 87-88 to 92-93 and he had the highest peak of them all in 88-89 has well.

If we remove Gretzky-Lemieux, during is prime

Yzerman...: 732 points
Robitaille: 633 points
Lafontaine: 611 points
Hull......: 602 pts
Messier...: 596 pts

Goals
Hull......: 355
Yzerman...: 331
Robtaille.: 303
Lafontaine: 286
Gartner...: 260

Even strength points
Gretzly...: 491
Yzerman...: 462
Lemieux...: 448
Robitaille: 414

PPG (at least 100 games):

Yzerman...: 1.57
Lafontaine: 1.38
Messier...: 1.37
Oates.....: 1.35
Hull......: 1.33

And is separation from the rest is typical of the best of the non gretzky-Lemieux other great , with a bunch of elite players close to each other and him at a different level.

He does not cleanly dominate that era because of Lemieux-Gretzky and peak Brett Hull when it come to goal scoring, which we could say without being certain but confident, that about no one ever would have either.

 

[86Habs]

interesting discussion everyone. and it's also not lost to me that i'm doing exactly what jackslater was talking about: "looking at Sakic's superior number of top ten scoring placements (for example) . . . over time the players get forgotten and people are just left comparing resume bullet points."

re: yzerman and the pack, '88 to '90, i certainly agree that over those three seasons as a whole yzerman was far and away the third best offensive player. but i guess i'd have to be convinced that there was clear separation between '88 yzerman and '88 savard and '90 yzerman and '90 messier to say he was the clear #3 the entire time, again speaking purely about scoring ability not overall game which i think is a whole other can of worms.

the lafontaine comparison brought up above several times is interesting. why was lafontaine considered a creme de la creme offensive player in 1990? because he had just had his breakthrough season, which people had been waiting on for half a decade. and i do wonder whether what is instructive about 1990 lafontaine relates to 1988 yzerman's share of the hart voting. as in, did yzerman get bonus points for being a visually flashy player in a breakout year (vs savard and hawerchuk)? and maybe more significantly, did yzerman get bonus points for scoring so much on such a bad team?

that last part is interesting to me because we now think of being the long guy on an awful team in two different ways. either you are a hero and doing the lord's work all by yourself with no help (rookie hawerchuk, dead wings yzerman, 1990 lafontaine, 1998 selanne, 2002 iginla), so we project more points in the place of the "help" you don't have, or we contextualize your numbers by arguing that you had an inflated share of scoring opportunities because there was no one else fit to carry the puck (florida bure, kovalchuk in the car crash year, i think andy bathgate also tends to get this tag). i distinctly remember reading an article about lafontaine in the 1990 season saying he was the real MVP because he was so high in scoring with randy wood and derek king as his wingers. we might therefore also want to look at lafontaine's 5th place in 1990, ahead of 127 point yzerman, in the same light as yzerman's 4th place in 1988, ahead of 131 point savard.

none of this is to say that yzerman wasn't better than the savard/hawerchuk pack, because i think 1989 shows that his ceiling was higher than theirs. and yzerman being the clear best offensive player is certainly how i remember the temperature of the room back then. i'm just trying to place a little scrutiny on that received wisdom, especially given that he went from #3/4 scorer when it was him and gerard gallant to the bottom of the top ten in '91 and '92 when fedorov arrived. i wonder if his true level in a vacuum would have been something in between, which imo would be as squarely the best guy in the stastny/savard/hawerchuk/lafontaine/oates pack.

All good points of course. My memories of the 1988 season are fairly hazy, but Yzerman was pacing at ~62 goals and ~127 points (versus Savard's 44 and 131, respectively), and accumulated more even-strength points in his 64 games than Savard did over the course of his entire season (Yzerman's ES production accounted for 60% of his point totals, versus 43% for Savard). To me, the goals, the shooting ability, the willingness to drive to the net, and the ES production (all with less help than Savard) tell the story and in my mind create some degree of separation from Savard in that particular season. Savard was a spectacular player of course, incredibly talented, maybe one of the few players in the league who was more enjoyable to watch than Yzerman, but my personal opinion is that he just didn't have that same killer instinct that Yzerman did; Yzerman put a ton of pucks on net during his peak and went to the net with reckless abandon. Both guys were incredible in transition and on the rush with the puck on their sticks in open ice, but the fact is Savard relied a lot more on the power play for his point production.

The consensus view on Yzerman was then confirmed by his 1989 season. In 1990, Messier had his best offensive season, but again Yzerman scored more goals (62 versus 45) and was a bit better at even strength (62% of his production, versus Messier's 55%). Look at the shots on net! 332 for Yzerman, 211 for Messier - 57% more. The case here is less clear-cut than 1988, imo, as Messier was of course an absolute beast in all aspects of the game. Still, being a slight (2 points) behind an upper-tier HHOFer in his peak offensive season is nothing to sneeze at; this was a monster season by Yzerman.

A little off in 1991, though still 7th in league scoring and tied for 2nd in goals behind peak Hull. 1992 - probably 5th in scoring, accounting for Gretzky and Lemieux (and Stevens). 1993 - probably the end of his peak, and an outstanding season; 3rd in scoring (removing Lemieux). So all told, this is an incredible run of seasons. I have no issues putting him at the top of an Oates/Lafontaine/Savard/Hawerchuk/Stastny pack (which is the order I'd have them in), but did he create clear separation? I think he did, personally. Lafontaine, while being stylistically similar to Yzerman (I agree with the poster above who commented that Lafontaine is a better comp for Yzerman than Sakic) was held back at the start of the timeframe being looked at and had some durability issues, but probably had only 1 season in there where you could definitively say that he was on or above Yzerman's level (1993). Oates, while an incredible setup man, just didn't have the offensive repertoire that Yzerman did. So for a season, or a handful of seasons, a few of these were on (or even above) Yzerman's level, but either didn't maintain that level of play consistently, or had shortcomings in other areas.

 

[slapshot101]

Detroit were chokers in every playoffs until they went defensive

 

[vadim sharifijanov]

I'll add that I think that Yzerman was the clear best offensive player for at least three seasons, from 1988-1990, in a way that was more clear at the time. It sort of reminds me of the way MacKinnon has been regarded over the last few years, which won't make sense to someone looking back in 20 years.

this is my favourite comparison in the thread. stylistically, when i remember peak yzerman (and to answer someone's question upthread, i'm exactly 40 so i was quite young), he looks a lot like mackinnon.

at least one Hart (1989) and maybe two (depending on how one feels about Fuhr in a hypothetical non-Gretzky NHL)

i have a really hard time imagining a gretzky/mario-less 1988 where they give the hart to 64 games of yzerman. this is the top ten in scoring:

Rk	Player	GP	G	A	PTS ▼	+/-	EV	PP	SH	GW	EV	PP	SH
1	Denis Savard*	80	44	87	131	4	23	14	7	6	33	48	6
2	Dale Hawerchuk*	80	44	77	121	-9	21	20	3	4	36	39	2
3	Mark Messier*	77	37	74	111	21	22	12	3	7	48	21	5
4	Luc Robitaille*	80	53	58	111	-9	36	17	0	6	33	25	0
5	Peter Stastny*	76	46	65	111	2	26	20	0	2	26	37	2
6	Jimmy Carson	80	55	52	107	-19	33	22	0	7	26	26	0
7	Michel Goulet*	80	48	58	106	-31	18	29	1	4	33	25	0
8	Håkan Loob	80	50	56	106	41	33	9	8	4	25	26	5
9	Mike Bullard	79	48	55	103	25	27	21	0	3	29	26	0
10	Steve Yzerman*	64	50	52	102	30	34	10	6	6	27	24	1

[TBODY] [/TBODY]
[TBODY] [/TBODY]

and again, savard is ahead of yzerman in points/game as well as obviously 29 more actual points. that said, yzerman very likely would have run away with the goal scoring race.

i also wonder whether 1988 messier with no gretzky on his team doesn't score closer to hawerchuk's pace.

but ultimately, the most revealing stat is this. that's the scoring race as of yzerman's last game of the season. mario has a sizeable lead in points, gretzky has a sizeable lead in points/game, savard has a sizeable lead among mortals in both (64 games, 38 goals, 112 pts, 1.75 points/game).

yzerman is one point behind hawerchuk in one fewer game played. stastny is 7/6 points behind them, respectively, in 6/5 fewer games, and therefore is outscoring them on a per game basis by 0.05 and 0.04 points/game.

why am i pointing this out? because if you compare the points/game ratios of all of yzerman's peers as of his last game of the season to where they ended up at the end of the season, every single one of them fell. none of them fell tremendously, but all of them, savard, hawerchuk, messier, and stastny, fell some. this isn't to say that yzerman would definitely have seen his per game pace fall too, but it does show that in the 64-odd games that everybody played, yzerman hadn't separated himself from his peers in scoring and looks better on a per game basis because they ended up playing out games that he didn't.

and i guess ultimately it's hard for me not to think of the 2000 season, when jagr played only 63 games, still won the hart trophy, and still didn't win the hart trophy. i feel like you really have to show mario-level separation to win a hart trophy while missing 1/5th of the season. (that said, i don't know that savard wins it either, as his team had an absolutely horrendous year; even though he was nowhere in the actual hart vote, i wonder if in the absence of gretz/mario a lot of those votes don't go to bourque.)

and the last thing here is, if detroit had, say, totally fallen apart in the last 16 games of that season i can see yzerman getting a significant hart bump. but detroit was at 72 points in the games yzerman played, 6th in the league. and they picked up 21 points in the 16 games he missed, good for 2nd in the league over that span. i'm guessing that likely won jacques demers the adams trophy (and then of course they went on to come out of the norris in the playoffs without him too). not to say he wasn't valuable, but maybe that his team was no longer as bad as people thought.

I have no issues putting him at the top of an Oates/Lafontaine/Savard/Hawerchuk/Stastny pack (which is the order I'd have them in), but did he create clear separation? I think he did, personally.

maybe separation is the tricky word here. i kind of mean a guy who transcended being what i call a garden variety 130 point superstar center, but obviously sub-mario level. on top of yzerman's contemporaries in the stastny/savard/hawerchuk/lafontaine/oates group, i'm also thinking of ratelle/perreault/sittler in the 70s. and going off that latter list, i think by separation i really mean scoring at lafleur/dionne levels—which again my feel from starting to follow hockey around '89 to '91 was an echelon people would have placed yzerman in.

but in retrospect, i have a lot of hesitation putting yzerman in that neighbourhood.

 

[JackSlater]

this is my favourite comparison in the thread. stylistically, when i remember peak yzerman (and to answer someone's question upthread, i'm exactly 40 so i was quite young), he looks a lot like mackinnon.

There are some stylistic similarities, especially in terms of how they get points. MacKinnon is obviously a more powerful skater and player, Yzerman more graceful and creative. I was more thinking that in in the future MacKinnon's general status, as it is today, won't make sense to people. Most lists you see have had MacKinnon as a top 2-5 player in the NHL for years now. Polls on here, THN lists, NHL player polls. That's generally his status. Looking back at it though, since 2017 he's only been 5, 5, 7, and 8 in scoring. He plays on a line with great players (Rantanen even outscored him one year) and doesn't do a whole lot defensively. Two second team all stars and a Byng. Colorado has underachieved in the playoffs. Maybe I'm wrong, but someone looking back in 30 years might be very confused at MacKinnon being perceived (in many cases) as the second best player in the NHL for years. Small margins, like five points here or there that can alter scoring races, don't really matter all that much to people who watched a player at the time but they seem to matter a lot when people look back and try to figure things out that they didn't actually experience.

None of that is to say that MacKinnon really has been the second best (or thereabouts) player in the NHL for years or that Yzerman was definitely the best forward after Gretzky and Lemieux for his peak seasons. But we lose something over time when it comes to these things and try to look back and piece it together.

 

[86Habs]

this is my favourite comparison in the thread. stylistically, when i remember peak yzerman (and to answer someone's question upthread, i'm exactly 40 so i was quite young), he looks a lot like mackinnon.



i have a really hard time imagining a gretzky/mario-less 1988 where they give the hart to 64 games of yzerman. this is the top ten in scoring:

Rk	Player	GP	G	A	PTS ▼	+/-	EV	PP	SH	GW	EV	PP	SH
1	Denis Savard*	80	44	87	131	4	23	14	7	6	33	48	6
2	Dale Hawerchuk*	80	44	77	121	-9	21	20	3	4	36	39	2
3	Mark Messier*	77	37	74	111	21	22	12	3	7	48	21	5
4	Luc Robitaille*	80	53	58	111	-9	36	17	0	6	33	25	0
5	Peter Stastny*	76	46	65	111	2	26	20	0	2	26	37	2
6	Jimmy Carson	80	55	52	107	-19	33	22	0	7	26	26	0
7	Michel Goulet*	80	48	58	106	-31	18	29	1	4	33	25	0
8	Håkan Loob	80	50	56	106	41	33	9	8	4	25	26	5
9	Mike Bullard	79	48	55	103	25	27	21	0	3	29	26	0
10	Steve Yzerman*	64	50	52	102	30	34	10	6	6	27	24	1

[TBODY] [/TBODY]
[TBODY] [/TBODY]

and again, savard is ahead of yzerman in points/game as well as obviously 29 more actual points. that said, yzerman very likely would have run away with the goal scoring race.

i also wonder whether 1988 messier with no gretzky on his team doesn't score closer to hawerchuk's pace.

but ultimately, the most revealing stat is this. that's the scoring race as of yzerman's last game of the season. mario has a sizeable lead in points, gretzky has a sizeable lead in points/game, savard has a sizeable lead among mortals in both (64 games, 38 goals, 112 pts, 1.75 points/game).

yzerman is one point behind hawerchuk in one fewer game played. stastny is 7/6 points behind them, respectively, in 6/5 fewer games, and therefore is outscoring them on a per game basis by 0.05 and 0.04 points/game.

why am i pointing this out? because if you compare the points/game ratios of all of yzerman's peers as of his last game of the season to where they ended up at the end of the season, every single one of them fell. none of them fell tremendously, but all of them, savard, hawerchuk, messier, and stastny, fell some. this isn't to say that yzerman would definitely have seen his per game pace fall too, but it does show that in the 64-odd games that everybody played, yzerman hadn't separated himself from his peers in scoring and looks better on a per game basis because they ended up playing out games that he didn't.

and i guess ultimately it's hard for me not to think of the 2000 season, when jagr played only 63 games, still won the hart trophy, and still didn't win the hart trophy. i feel like you really have to show mario-level separation to win a hart trophy while missing 1/5th of the season. (that said, i don't know that savard wins it either, as his team had an absolutely horrendous year; even though he was nowhere in the actual hart vote, i wonder if in the absence of gretz/mario a lot of those votes don't go to bourque.)

and the last thing here is, if detroit had, say, totally fallen apart in the last 16 games of that season i can see yzerman getting a significant hart bump. but detroit was at 72 points in the games yzerman played, 6th in the league. and they picked up 21 points in the 16 games he missed, good for 2nd in the league over that span. i'm guessing that likely won jacques demers the adams trophy (and then of course they went on to come out of the norris in the playoffs without him too). not to say he wasn't valuable, but maybe that his team was no longer as bad as people thought.

maybe separation is the tricky word here. i kind of mean a guy who transcended being what i call a garden variety 130 point superstar center, but obviously sub-mario level. on top of yzerman's contemporaries in the stastny/savard/hawerchuk/lafontaine/oates group, i'm also thinking of ratelle/perreault/sittler in the 70s. and going off that latter list, i think by separation i really mean scoring at lafleur/dionne levels—which again my feel from starting to follow hockey around '89 to '91 was an echelon people would have placed yzerman in.

but in retrospect, i have a lot of hesitation putting yzerman in that neighbourhood.

I mean, none of us here can really explain some of the strange trophy voting from the 1980s. In the absence of Mario/Wayne, would Yzerman had placed 2nd (or maybe 1st) first in Hart voting? Hard to say, though looking at the vote totals there was fairly clear separation of the top-4 in that particular year, with Savard some distance behind Yzerman. Relative to Savard, part of it was perhaps due to Detroit taking a step forward in 1978-1988, as compared to Chicago taking a step backwards - i.e., was Savard starting to be seen as a "bad team scorer", versus Yzerman, the flashy superstar and young leader (remember he was a newish captain) leading his team upwards in the standings. Hawerchuk may have fallen into the same narrative as Savard, as Winnipeg also took a step back in 1987-1988. Of that list, I find Messier's lack of Hart acknowledgement that year to be most odd, as he was the type of player that always seemed to hoover up Hart votes later in his career. But interestingly he received his first Hart votes (a 9th place finish) only the year before, and finished 8th in 1987-1988. The rest are fairly one-dimensional wingers, so no real surprise at their lack of Hart votes. So maybe Bourque takes it? I don't know, though I can say with confidence that Yzerman would most likely have finished top-5, despite the information that Detroit actually picked-up the pace in Yzerman's absence.

After the 1989 season, Yzerman had the highest single season point total of anyone not named Gretzky or Lemieux on his resume. To me, that's huge, at least in the way fans of the game and the media perceived him. More than Esposito, more than Orr, more than Coffey, more than Savard, more than Lafleur, more than Dionne. And who were we to know back then that in ~10 years scoring would completely dry up and some of the point totals we saw in that era would never be seen again, save for a generational talent in a high-scoring year (Jagr in 1996) or in an outrageously high scoring season (1992-1993)? At the time, when points ruled, and factoring in a strong follow-up in 1989-1990, he was the consensus 3rd best offensive talent in the game, after two of the four best players of all-time, and rightfully so imo.

 

[BraveCanadian]

At the time, when points ruled, and factoring in a strong follow-up in 1989-1990, he was the consensus 3rd best offensive talent in the game, after two of the four best players of all-time, and rightfully so imo.

Yzerman was definitely in the discussion as the best player in the league outside Gretzky and Lemieux during that time.. people have to remember that he wasn't a choker yet because Detroit wasn't that great around him, so he had the underdog narrative on his side as well.

 

[86Habs]

Yzerman was definitely in the discussion as the best player in the league outside Gretzky and Lemieux during that time.. people have to remember that he wasn't a choker yet because Detroit wasn't that great around him, so he had the underdog narrative on his side as well.

Yeah, I remember it being Gretzky, Lemieux, Bourque, Roy, Messier...then Yzerman, then Coffey, probably in that order.

 

[vadim sharifijanov]

I find Messier's lack of Hart acknowledgement that year to be most odd, as he was the type of player that always seemed to hoover up Hart votes later in his career. But interestingly he received his first Hart votes (a 9th place finish) only the year before, and finished 8th in 1987-1988.

i think if there was no gretzky, the player whose hart case changes the most is probably messier. not only is he now no longer in the shadow of two teammates, but without gretzky he would have had a completely different season.

but i'm not surprised at his lack of hart recognition that year, given that gretzky and fuhr were on his team.

i agree with you though, no way yzerman doesn't finish top five in MVP voting in 1988 if gretzky and mario don't exist.

 

[Jim MacDonald]

Bowman's side of the story was generally what was told in the media at the time.

Hi Tab! Good to read something from an old thread, both of us being huge Stevie Y fans!!!

Was Bowman's side of the story told to the media simply Yzerman initially "bristled" at being told he would need to change his game? Or are there other reports/narratives you can confirm (I know you were excellent with newspaper clippings and the like!!).

Not to throw names under the bus, but I think Keith Gave and Cynthia Lambert were the Red Wings "beat writers" for The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News respectively. I wonder if either of these two lost Yzerman's trust during the early 90's.

 

[tabness]

Hi Tab! Good to read something from an old thread, both of us being huge Stevie Y fans!!!

Was Bowman's side of the story told to the media simply Yzerman initially "bristled" at being told he would need to change his game? Or are there other reports/narratives you can confirm (I know you were excellent with newspaper clippings and the like!!).

Not to throw names under the bus, but I think Keith Gave and Cynthia Lambert were the Red Wings "beat writers" for The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News respectively. I wonder if either of these two lost Yzerman's trust during the early 90's.

Great to hear from you Jim, hope you and loved ones are doing well these days!

From what I've read, it doesn't seem that the change in game was much of a contention that played out in the papers, Yzerman, as well as Fedorov and Coffey all seemed to be quoted as accepting it, and indeed, the Wings from the get go during the shortened 1995 season played vastly differently from the way they played a year before. If Yzerman was angry about being the third line center that year, he didn't make too much of a stink in the papers at least.

The juiciest tidbits actually come from the year before in the papers, and they are mostly from Yzerman's side in a sense, as Bowman doesn't let too many quotables out directly to the papers, but it's more reported second hand. Things like the Bowman "hit list" of "whiners and complainers" where Yzerman leads the list. It also isn't just with Bowman, the whole brain trust which had to include Devellano and probably Holland are involved, and Yzerman is pretty clear of his anger at the situation and people involved especially during the height of the trade rumors to Ottawa in October 1995. Even though it seems that Yzerman and Bowman patch up their relationship later into 1995-1996, the last juicy quote I remember coming across was Yzerman regarding Bowman on how Coffey was treated when he was traded and that was well into 1996-1997. I'll try to dig some of these up and post them.

In terms of Keith Gave and Cynthia Lambert, I actually skimmed through Cynthia's book a while back, and she seemed very positive on Yzerman and their relationship. It was obviously written 20 years after all this happened and good times followed tough times though. Keith actually created an account here to discuss his new book Vlad the Impaler, so I hope he chimes in himself on those tumultuous pre cup years.

A book I'd suggest you pick up (if you can find it for a not outrageous price, long out of print) that is probably one of the best sources from one point of view is Chess Sheppard's book Heaven on Ice. It's about his brother Ray, who obviously played with the Wings during that time, had (good) history with Yzerman as a kid, and had (bad) history with Bowman before Detroit in Buffalo. It was also written before the Wings won their first cup (published shortly after), and so avoids a bit of a retrospective gloss on things. I'll try to see if I can post pictures of good tidbits from it.

 

[Jim MacDonald]

A book I'd suggest you pick up (if you can find it for a not outrageous price, long out of print)

I'd love to get this!! You hit the "nail on the head" though, I only found it for like a couple hundred of dollars on Ebay or Amazon or one of them...

My loved ones are well all things considered as I hope yours are! Thank you for your kind words as well as your knowledge on this. I know the inner workings of a team are usually behind "closed doors," and stuff, and by no means do I consider myself a "gossip," but it would be VERY cool and interesting to know the "specific" hard times Bowman and Yzerman had to overcome during the underachieving...wow does it make 97 all the more sweeter!!