tarheelhockey
Offside Review Specialist
The most significant way that it doesn't is that he was considered the league's best goalie by the league's GMs over an extended period.
Well no, Rollins' career wasn't as good as Worters, just like anyone else in this round.
To phrase my question more clearly: why are we penalizing Rollins for being the only good player on a terrible team when we didn't penalize Worters for it? We spoke highly of Worters' ability to "keep his team in the game" (as compared to a Hainsworth or Durnan) and that is probably the defining aspect of Rollins' career. It's not unreasonable to think Rollins would have been very highly successful if he had the same kinds of seasons on a better team and the same career in a better organization -- probably resembling a Lumley type of career, right? And was that not exactly where Worters made up ground on Hainsworth?
Cechmanek and McNeil were on 0 lists and Theodore was only on 2. Osgood was on quite a few lists, though.
Thank god, thank god, and ****. Respectively.
On the other hand, it's crystal clear that Rollins wouldn't have come anywhere near the Hart if modern standards were in place - his team was last in the league by a wide margin, and his GAA was worst in the league by a wide margin, after having respectable numbers in both the season before when he was 2nd in Hart voting.
You've spent the entire project discounting 1AS votes from that era because they correlate with GAA -- and now you think Hart votes should be discounted if they DON'T correlate with GAA?? That's the kind of inconsistency that worries me here. Basically you've now said that Rollins didn't deserve his Hart AND Lumley didn't deserve his 1AS that season for opposite reasons.
Isn't it conceivable that the writers simply didn't think that Rollins' GAA and wins reflected his actual performance? Shouldn't we begin with the assumption that 80+40 writers knew what they were talking about, rather than beginning with the idea that they were all a bunch of sentimental saps and looking for evidence to support that interpretation?
We also have additional evidence in the form of newspaper reports at the time that criticized the increasing sentimentality of the Hart and that were shocked because "everyone thought Kelly was going to win." Even one of the advocates for Rollins said other players were "more valuable in the strict sense" but Rollins should win the "Hart" because of his "heart."
We can find articles like that for any award from any season. 80 of 142 voters thought Rollins deserved either 1st place in the Hart race that year, so the least we could say is that the critics were a minority.
Even so, you're still left with 3 great seasons for Rollins (1951, 1953, 1954) and not much filler, right?
Definitely -- but that could be said of Thomas as well. But Rollins has more filler, in a sense, because he was actually in the NHL racking up seasons and GP longer than Thomas and by all indications he deserved to continue to be in the league when he was given the axe.
It's possible Rollins' career was tanked by a manager, but I'm not entirely convinced.
Granted, he was competing with Lumley and a hot young Glen Hall for the spot in Chicago. It's entirely plausible that he would have had to go to another organization, such as Boston in particular, in order to find work. But there was no question whatsoever that he was NHL-worthy. I mean c'mon, he was better than Don Simmons or Marcel Paille.
Rollins ended up suing the Blackhawks for preventing him from pursuing his livelihood, if that's any indication of how much of a "hockey decision" there was in freezing him out of a contract and refusing to trade his rights.