It was a different era. Plenty of top defensemen racked up PIMs back then. Holding him to today’s standards in that regard is disingenuous.
As for the “bad decision maker” part, that’s just bogus. Again, he was a Norris finalist, led the league in plus-minus, and got Hart votes all while logging heavy minutes at age 23. That doesn’t scream low IQ to me, which honestly seems to be what you’re insinuating. He wasn’t all athleticism or size at all, like you are seemingly trying to suggest.
Irrelevant. How is this relevant to hockey? Especially in a thread about a prospect who’s yet to play an NHL game. You’re grasping at straws here to paint your guy in a favourable light in comparison to one of the greats. So weird.
So this all comes off pretty strongly as you not remembering Chris Pronger in the mid-90s. The amount of criticism directed to him for reckless, sloppy, or otherwise stupid play was not insignificant. The fact that the Whalers felt he wasn’t maturing was not privileged information. His being sent to play for Mike Keenan did not go over the heads of the public.
Go beyond the stat sheet and read some articles from that era, watch some video analysis. Pronger absolutely was a talented meathead (I never said “all size”, he had the hockey skill). I’m not just pulling that out of my ass.
Do you know how he got traded to St Louis? He had a clause in his contract that he was supposed to spend the summer in Hartford training. Instead he went to his GM and said he’d rather go home and “train” on his own. So JR sends Paul Holmgren up to check on him at midsummer, and all he’s doing is hanging around his hometown killing time. The minute he dropped Holmgren at the airport, Holmgren’s on the phone with JR and the trade gets done in a matter of hours. Pronger genuinely didn’t see it coming. He really thought he could just go to his GM and call out of contractually-mandated training, and then go fishing all summer and nothing was going to happen.
He became a different person after Iron Mike and playing with guys like Gretzky, Hawerchuk, MacInnis, etc. That’s the Pronger that people learned to fear, not the one who was minute-munching his way to Ls with dumb penalties and a careless attitude.
The point is that they aren’t at all similar, even stylistically lmao. It’s such a strange comparison. Again, it just seems like you picked Pronger because he’s a tall HOF two-way defenseman, ignoring how unique he was beyond that because you wanted to hype your guy as much as possible lol. Nevermind that Pronger at the same age was already one of the best D in the world. They are nothing alike lol
Nikitin is much closer to a guy like Zaitsev than he is Chris Pronger.
See, the difference between you and me is that if you say Zaitsev’s a comparable, I don’t lose my mind just because they’re not exactly the same guy. That’s how prospect comparables work.
To be clear, I don’t remember Zaitsev ever leading his team in scoring. Nikishin has a totally different caliber of offensive game, scoring at a higher rate than the forward star prospect Demidov. He’s also bigger than Zaitsev, and by all accounts a better positional defender. But yes, they do have some traits in common. Which is how comparables work because you’re never going to make a perfect comparison between a prospect and a guy who’s played a long career already.