NYR Top 10 Centers of All-Time (Preliminary Top 20 List Due!)

[Zil]

No but really.

1. Mess
2. Gretz
3. Ratelle

I also think Beaver gets a place somewhere for his 2012 Playoffs.

You misspelled Boucher.

 

[Cake or Death]

It is very worth noting that Frank Boucher played in a low scoring era with shorter seasons. If you look at his adjusted stats from Hockey Reference, which adjust for era and length of season, these are some amazingly impressive seasons:

1926-27 NHL 117 (2)
1927-28 NHL 127 (4)
1928-29 NHL 145 (1)
1929-30 NHL 160 (2)
1930-31 NHL 122 (4)
1932-33 NHL 81 (7)
1933-34 NHL 98 (3)
1934-35 NHL 87 (2)
Career NHL 1155 (47)

Effectively 1137 points with the Rangers, when adjusted for era and length of season and removing his season with Ottawa.

 

[Richter Scale]

Crease -- I'm fine with extending the deadline if people want to. Sending you my list today. Apologies that I didn't really participate in the discussion much -- work picked up and didn't have as much time to devote to this. And so my ranking is a bit more based on general feel for each player than I would have liked it to be if I had more time. Toughest part of this for me was probably in determining the exact order I would rank the top 5-6 and the bottom 5-6 of the top 20.

Looking forward to seeing what everyone else's thoughts are and the discussion in the next round. I have a feeling some of my rankings will be going against the grain.

 

[Crease]

Good morning everyone. Nice win last night. If you'd like to participate in the voting round, please try to PM me your Top 20 list by end of day today. If you would like to participate but you need more time, let me know. I understand with the playoffs going on...

 

[bernmeister]

I respectfully disagree. Just curious; are you old enough to have witnessed Orr's entire run as a player? He is hands down the greatest player(not just defenseman) to ever play the game of hockey; he could do things on both sides of the puck that other players could only dream about and that includes Gretzky(#3 all-time) and Lemieux(#4 all-time). Btw, Howe would be #2 all-time in my book!
Sorry to go off topic

sorry, thought I responded to this.
Quick courtesy, then back to topic of Cs due today.

Saw some of Orr's early years. Yes, 1 gazillion percent, Orr remains the best ever to date, IMO.

I believed my reference to Leetch was clear as to him being an Orr lite.
Both had marvelous skating ability, forwards AND backwards and could stop on a dime. IMO Orr was better shooter, much better at direction than Leetch.

As to Park, Orr was the better skater and scorer. Park was fabulous at low shots in the sweet spot about 6ish inches off the surface, either side, made lots of nice rebounds. beautiful shot.

Orr used his speed and intelligence well, and did not have to play as much D 'cause the Bruins were able to sustain great amounts of offense.

Park was way better on overall defense, better at your straight body check, and had the very best hip check ever, IMO, in the league. No ju jitsu master demonstrated more talent and ability, whether he was the approacher or the approachee getting close to Douglas Bradford Park, was better at literally sending opponents flying on a hip check that seemed to use the fullness of Park's legit strength and the opponents power of their own skating against them

Yes, Orr was best overall.
Park was the master of what specialty areas were in his domain.

 

[Crease]

Good morning all. I plan on compiling the submissions this weekend. If you would like to participate in the voting rounds but have not submitted a top 20 list yet, you may PM me your list sometime today or tomorrow. Voting round 1 will begin on Monday.

 

[Chief]

Keeling, Poddubny, and Murdoch aren't C

Poddubny was a winger in Toronto but he played center when he came over to the Rangers.

BTW - I'm having a hard time understanding why Nicholls is included but no one seems to have mentioned Nylander (and don't say it's because Nylander played with Jagr. Gomez and Drury proved that wasn't necessarily a recipe for success).

Nylander:
05-06 81 games
06-07 79 games
Stats: 160 games, 162 points, +43...Playoffs 14 games, 14 points

Nicholls:
89-90 32 games
90-91 71 games
91-92 1 game
Stats: 104 games, 110 points, +1...Playoffs 15 games, 19 points

 

[Chief]

Frank Boucher is #1 on this list, and it is not even remotely close...He is the greatest Ranger center without the slightest doubt.

I think you're going a bit overboard here. You could argue that the competition was less in Boucher's day with the talent pool the NHL was drawing from being a lot shallower, not to mention the seasons were shorter. Heck, the most games Boucher ever played in a playoff run was 9 games. Messier played in 23 when the Rangers won the Cup.

 

[Cake or Death]

I think you're going a bit overboard here. You could argue that the competition was less in Boucher's day with the talent pool the NHL was drawing from being a lot shallower, not to mention the seasons were shorter. Heck, the most games Boucher ever played in a playoff run was 9 games. Messier played in 23 when the Rangers won the Cup.

I don't know. I spent about 8 hours compiling my top 20 list and Boucher was nowhere close to anyone else. I created a point system which used a lot of different things, and assigned them a value measured against the frequency of instances where a NYR ever achieved those things. When all was said and done, Boucher ended up with 330 points - more than the 2, 3, and 4 centers combined. My top 5 came away like this: 330, 105, 101, 99, 72

Consider that since the NYR entered the league, a NYR center has only ever been named NHL first all-star 4 times. Boucher has 3 of those 4. Consider that there are 47 instances where a NYR center has ever finished top 10 in goals, assists, or points in the playoffs. Of those 47 instances, 15 of them are Boucher. Our list of centers have won a total of 7 cups, Boucher is 2 of those 7, and the only player on the list with two cup wins.

No matter how I was cutting this, Boucher always wound up severely separated from the pack.

 

[Chief]

I flip-flopped my top two spots more than once before settling on my rankings. When you have a team that goes as far back as the Rangers, it can be easy to lose sight of the players from long ago...but I think it's just as easy to overstate their accomplishments if you don’t dig a little below the surface.

Boucher's Rangers won 2 Cups and he's the only Rangers center with 2 Cups. That is impressive but the fact is you could win the Cup back in 1927-28 by winning only 5 games - which is exactly how many Boucher's 1927-28 Rangers won. (*see below for how the playoffs were set up back in 1927-28 and in Boucher's other Cup winning year 1932-33).

The 93-94 Rangers had to win 16 games to win the Cup. To me, having to win 16 games and playing in 23, is a much more daunting task than winning 5 games and playing in 9. If I were going to put a point value on winning the Cup, the 93-94 Cup would be worth 2.5 or 3X as much as either of the 27-28 and 32-33 Cups. As a result, in my rankings, Boucher 2 Cups do not give him an edge over Messier.

Cake or Death mentioned below that there are 47 instances where a NYR center finished top 10 in goals, assists, or points in the playoffs. Of those 47 instances, 15 of them are Boucher. That's an impressive stat...but if you're going to compare that stat to stats from players in the modern era, you're comparing apples to oranges for the following reasons.

In Boucher's era you had:
- Less teams making the playoffs so there were less players making the playoffs and competing for scoring stats;
- Less players per team, which further lessened the numbers of players competing for stats;
- Less players per team also meant those players in the playoffs played greater minutes, which gave them more opportunities to score than players who came after NHL expansions;
- Less games played in the playoffs meant a player who got eliminated in the 2nd round after 4 games, might still have a shot to outscore a player from a Cup winning team that played 7 games. In today's era, if you get knocked out early in the playoffs it's virtually impossible to score as much as a player on a team that plays 3 or 4 times as many games as you.

Anyway, I just wanted to mention the above so people realized that stats, titles or awards can't often be taken at face value. I’m sure most people already realized that but those types of considerations made it extremely difficult for me to rank my top 3 (not to mention the other 17 slots).

*The first 2 rounds of the playoffs in Boucher's day were 2 series of 2 games each. The team with the most goals scored advanced to the next round. In the Finals, a team had to win 3 games to win the Cup.

 

[Greg02]

You definitely need to view them within context of the era, but you also need to view them within context of the player. Boucher was voted the best center in the NHL three times, was easily a hall of famer, and was good enough that he came out of retirement 4 years later for 15 games and was something like a point per game (admittedly it was during the war years, but still- he was playing with no one). It wasn't like he was just compiling by default; he was viewed of as one of the top players in the NHL for something like 15 years. While there were less teams and a shorter road to the cup, it still wasn't easy. If it was, we would have won more than three times from 1926-1967. I'm not quite sure you can put caveats on Frank Boucher without putting caveats on that entire era.

 

[Chief]

Just to be clear, I wasn't trying to say that Boucher's accomplishments weren't impressive. IMHO you've got Boucher, Messier and Ratelle in the top 3 and, for me, there are arguments to be made for each to claim the top spot.