Well I said on those dynasty teams. After the dynasty petered/gassed out is another story although you're just throwing up points and not looking beyond them, which was my major problem with the Jagr junkies.
OK, fine, I misunderstood you. I don't think anybody is disputing that Bossy was the 3rd best player during the dynasty years. I just don't see why that is all that relevant, because if that's your only consideration then you're kind of erasing like half of Bossy's career, not to mention there are guys already on the list who also spent part of their careers as the 3rd best player on a dynasty.
I think Bossy often gets the negative framing of people focusing only on the dynasty years or only on his goalscoring numbers compared to Wayne Gretzky or rating him based on Hockey-Reference's adjusted stats rather than good ones that aren't biased against '80s scorers, or whatever. Framing is important. For example, Joe Sakic was the best or second-best player in both of Colorado's Stanley Cup runs, which is something that often gets brought up (particularly in comparisons against his Swedish teammate). Outside of those runs, though, in 1995, 1997-2000 and 2002-04 combined I would rank Sakic as very clearly the third best player in Colorado in the postseason. Focusing only those two runs would be a mistake, just like counting them out entirely would be a mistake, you should really be looking at the whole picture to make a proper evaluation. Same thing with saying that Bossy was always the third best player on his teams, as if absolutely nothing at all changed on Long Island between 1978 and 1986.
It's what some people simply will not look at or acknowledge when assigning value to a hockey player. I'm not saying YOU specifically but certain folks (on this board or otherwise) think the only job of evaluating a F is by looking at their offensive output only. It's nonsense. Do we only look at how good at producing offense a Dman was? No. So why do I continually see people only focusing on one aspect of a F's abilities? Paul Coffey was an elite offensive Dman but generally viewed as weak defensively. Jack Stewart is viewed in an opposite light. They're not up for discussion now because of those deficiencies.
I agree with all of that, and can assure you that's not what I'm doing. Even for forwards, defence matters, penalty killing matters, the player's deployment matters, the situational breakdown of their scoring matters, etc.
But I also think that it is important to consider that offensive output is not always the same. Often that favours the two-way center (as when I made the case for Bobby Clarke's playoffs last round based on how highly situational his scoring was), but sometimes it actually helps the scoring winger. And I think there are at least some reasons to consider that Mike Bossy's offence might have actually been more valuable than Bryan Trottier's.
Consider, for example, the power play. I think the third wheel on the Islanders' power play was definitely Trottier, considering he only led his team in power play scoring once in his entire career (and that was in 1986-87, after the other two guys had both notably declined as well). In contrast, Bossy led the Islanders in PP scoring 7 times, while Potvin did it 6 times. How valuable were Trottier's PP points compared to Potvin's or Bossy's? I think that's a legitimate question, perhaps somewhere where the eye test might come in handy. I'm not necessarily saying that the other guys were dragging around Trottier, but on the other hand I don't really see much reason to think that Trottier was boosting Mike Bossy's power play scoring at any point of their careers (in the way that Trottier probably did at even strength in the late '70s, for example).
Secondly, the dynasty Islanders were notable for really rolling their lines during the playoffs. If we look at each player's minuses (i.e. the total goals against each player was on the ice for minus the power play goals against while they were on the ice), both overall and on a per-game basis, it becomes pretty obvious that they had three lines all getting pretty significant play:
New York Islanders, Playoffs, 1980-83:
| Player | GP | Minuses | Minuses/GP |
| Nystrom | 73 | 55 | 0.75 |
| Merrick | 77 | 54 | 0.70 |
| Tonelli | 76 | 53 | 0.70 |
| Trottier | 75 | 48 | 0.64 |
| Bourne | 74 | 42 | 0.57 |
| Bossy | 72 | 39 | 0.54 |
| Goring | 78 | 42 | 0.54 |
| Gillies | 66 | 34 | 0.52 |
| Kallur | 51 | 24 | 0.47 |
| D Sutter | 72 | 28 | 0.39 |
| Henning | 22 | 6 | 0.27 |
| Howatt | 29 | 6 | 0.21 |
| B Sutter | 39 | 8 | 0.21 |
| Carroll | 57 | 9 | 0.16 |
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A couple of things to note:
1. Trottier was a two-way player, but it doesn't appear that he was used in a shutdown or matchup role like Bobby Clarke was. It certainly appears based on GA that Wayne Merrick was the guy tasked with the tough minutes. So Trottier should get credit for being a great two-way player, but I don't necessarily think his offence was being suppressed because of his role, and I'm fairly confident he comfortably led all Islander forwards in ice time.
2. Bossy is very much in the pack among the rest of the Islander top 9 forwards in terms of minuses (and I didn't even subtract shorthanded goals against on the power play out here, so Bossy probably has 4-5 extra minuses for that alone compared to guys like Goring or Kallur who didn't get nearly as much time with the extra man).
In other words, either Bossy was elite defensively or he did not get unusually high ice time compared to the other top 9 forwards in New York. That makes his playoff scoring even more impressive. It also explains why the Islanders' depth guys like Nystrom, Bourne, Goring, Gillies, etc. were able to have a major impact in those postseasons.
I get the instinct to not overrate scoring totals, but not every scoring winger was the same as Jaromir Jagr. Some of them were leading elite power plays and scoring tons of clutch goals in big games for great teams that spread out the ice time. The guys that did that deserve a lot of credit for it, and giving them that proper credit does not under any circumstances make you an unthinking "stats junkie".
Then also look to see who each player was competing with for postseason awards and what not. Who had it rougher? The C, the D, or the RW?
Clearly the C, especially in the Gretzky era, but from 1983-86 we're talking about these relative All-Star rankings by position:
Potvin: 6-4-13-7
Trottier: NR-2-NR-7
Bossy: 1-1-2-1
You need to have a pretty substantial discounting of wingers to claim that a RW like Bossy (who was putting up numbers that compare very strongly to top players from other eras) was still worse than, say, the 7th best D or C in the league.
