To me, the Lidstrom-as-a-top-20-player is overly-reliant on comparing his status to other defensemen that overlapped with him and ignoring his status relative to other forwards and goaltenders who played at the same time and were also better than Lidstrom’s Norris competition.
We looked at Brodeur earlier who had 7+ seasons where he was considered better than Lidstrom’s positional competition. What about Jagr? 8+? Sakic at 7? Hasek at 6? Selanne at 4-6? Forsberg at 5 before we figure out what to do with 2002, 2004, and 2006?
Realistically, how much of a gap could Lidstrom (who had less staying power in the best-player-in-the-world talks than Markus Naslund) have even generated over countryman Forsberg, who THN had pegged as Sweden’s best player ever as early as 1992 and was talked about off-and-on as the best player in the world from 1996-2006 while being the plurality (if not majority) choice in the back-end of that time frame? Like... the earliest we can say Lidstrom surpasses Forsberg in career value is the 2008 season when Lidstrom is a legit top-3 player while Forsberg, at this point more metal than man, has just the 14 points in 9 games comeback.
So if he’s barely clearing a pretty high bar set by Forsberg, how exactly is he better than Jagr, Hasek, Sakic, and Brodeur - four players who also had better careers than Forsberg? And I’m hoping the answer is something Lidstrom did and not something that Scott Niedermayer, Rob Blake, a handful of 40-year-olds who peaked in the late-1980s and early-1990s, or the often-injured Chris Pronger didn’t (be adequate Norris competition).
I mean when did this Lidstrom over Jagr business start? Yeah, Jagr was one of the more balanced scorers - as much a threat as a goal scorer as his competition on RW (Bure and Selanne) while also having incredible puck possession and creativity, but actor Scott Wolf from “Party of Five” announced Lidstrom’s name instead of Lubomir Visnovsky’s, so...
