Are any of us even qualified to discuss how good Doug Harvey was? None of us were even born.
For those who haven't watched him, wouldn't the seven Norris trophies (and the one he would have won if it existed earlier), the hart consideration and the fact that he was the best player on the best Dynasty in history be enough?
Say I arbitrarily made up my own system (after thinking about it for like 5 seconds) and assigned 5 points for a Norris win. 4 points for 2nd. 3 for 3rd. 2 for 4th. and 1 for 5th. I wonder how Bourques career would stack up to Lidstroms? Perhaps Bourque is much "deeper" in this respect.
See, that's what I mean. Say there are two guys who each played 15 years. they have six top-5 finishes between them. Player A won the award once. Player B was 5th five times. I think we'd have to be crazy to consider them equals. But 1 point for 5th, and 5 points for 1st implies that. So although your quick formula ultimately called Bourque better anyway, you can see what I mean about how a points system that makes sense and puts Lidstrom ahead is tough to do.
I'd look at something closer to 10-8-7-6-5 to start.[/QUOTE]
So now we have a "Select Handful" position which is ultra vague but potentially interesting. For the sake of brevity let's focus on the 1966 AST voting versus the 2011 AST voting, dmen.
If we look at the dmen in each instance, the 1965-66 NHL featured 6 teams with a core of 4 dmen and 1 or 2 subs/swingmen. The AST voting was conducted by a group of voters representing the 6 NHL cities,. So out of a core group of 24 dmen 19 made a sufficient impression, enough to get at least a vote, within a rather select group of voters, ~77% impressed.
2010-11 NHL season,, 30 teams with three core defensive pairings or a total of 180 dmen ready to impress an assortment of voters from 30 NHL cities.Plus the dmen are not Canada centric so there is not a concentration of talents, styles, skill sets, etc but a much greater variety plus the voters have a much greater appreciations of these various elements. Yet in terms of raw numbers not adjusted or pro-rated only 13 manage to impress enough, ~7%.
The average and below talent pool has expanded to the point where there are very few elite talents in the NHL today. That the 2011 Norris is one of the weakest ever supports this. If the concentration amongst dmen was high then the Norris competition would not be so weak.Do you expect to see 4 - 6 all Time Top 100 competing for the Norris any given year like you did in the Harvey/Horton/Pilote/Kelly era? Or the Orr/Potvin/Park/Robinson, Salming/Savard era?
To answer your question first, no, I don't.
Secondly, as you can see from my long post here, I do agree that there has been a greater concentration of good talent in the O6 era but that overall the number of players of a certain caliber has increased fairly linearly. The elite, top-100 level players, however, can be highly variable from generation to generation. If you believe that there are about twice as many players at any given caliber, just because there are 50 defensemen today as good as the 25th-best 50 years ago, it doesn't have to follow that 10=5. There's too much variance there, and I think we can all see that we are experiencing a major lull in top-flight defensemen right now.
Anyway, the point about all-star voting is still moot because the voters have a finite amount of votes to give out. If they were allowed to arbitrarily decide who was elite and each voter could say that 1-20 players were elite at their own discretion, then the voting results we saw then and now would indicate something very similar to what you think they indicate. But that's not the case.
Using the defensemen as an example, you say just 13 "managed to impress enough". what if all else stays the same, but defensemen 6-8 were so definitively better that they took the rest of the votes that defensemen 9-13 would have received? it would look like there were only 8 good defensemen worthy of any consideration. You'd say it was an even weaker season than this year was. but it was stronger. On the other hand, what if you lop off Chara, Lidstrom and Weber? the voters still have to cast three votes. In all likelihood a good dozen more defensemen end up with a 3rd-place vote they'd have never received. Then there are more defensemen that "managed to impress enough". You'd call this a stronger season, but it's clearly weaker in this hypothetical.
Point is, looking at the percentage of players who got an all-star vote as an indication of the strength of the league is very poor science.
