TheGoldenJet - I'm moving our discussion about the Top 100 players lists (from 2018/19) into this thread (since it has nothing to do with Leon Draisaitl, which is
where the conversation originated). (I wrote this reply in early January but forgot to post it until now).
You said that the Top 100 players list is "heavily biased, due to primarily North Americans doing the voting" and "...having a large group of North Americans submit ranking lists) present a skewed depiction of reality (eg. having North American players ranked above non-North American players)."
First, I oppose these kinds of blanket statements about the voters. You're treating the voters as one homogeneous group, on the basis of their nationality and ethnicity. That's the very definition of identity politics. (Replace "North American" with "Blacks", "Muslims" or "LGBT" and you'll see how discriminatory your statement sounds). There are plenty of places where you can talk about identity politics online (Reddit, Twitter, etc) but let's keep that off of HFBoards.
Of course, it's possible that the list could be biased for or against certain types of players. The relevant question is - do the results actually demonstrate bias? It doesn't matter if the voters are all North American, or all Russian, or all Tanzanian - if bias actually exists, would be observable in the output.
To demonstrate that bias exists, you'd have to show that HOH's ranking of Russian/Soviet players is consistently lower than what similar lists show. For example, we ranked Fetisov 25th. If most mainstraim lists have him ranked, say, 15th or higher, that might be evidence of bias. But you'd have to do that systematically, looking at how most/all Russian/Soviet/European players were ranked. You haven't provided any evidence so far. Present your researchm then we can review it. Without this, there's no factual basis for your statement.
I'll repeat my question from the previous thread - if the HOH project was biased against Russian players (in favour of Canadian players), why did we rank Slava Fetisov and Sergei Makarov higher than Canadian legends who are (almost) universally respected like Joe Sakic, Steve Yzerman, Martin Brodeur, Mike Bossy, and (yes) Bryan Trottier? Go make a poll and see how many HFBoards users would pick Fetisov and Makarov as the top two players from that list of seven. Why did we rank Russian players who never played a single game in the NHL ahead of Canadian legends like Chris Pronger, Scott Stevens, and Marcel Dionne? We had a Soviet player from the 1960's (who I'd imagine 95% of people on this website have never even heard of) ranked ahead of Joe Thornton, Duncan Keith, Ed Belfour, and Frank Mahovlich.
"Of course, biased North American voters will often throw in a token Russian or Swede high up their ratings, to appear neutral. That is a common tactic"
If there was one highly ranked Russian player, and the others were ranked low, then that would be evidence of tokenism. That's obviouly not the case here, where Makarov and Fetisov are in the top 30, and Tretiak and Kharlamov are in the top fifty. A token ranking would be (for example) ranking Makarov very high, and the others much lower. That's not the case here.
Then you made three statements over the span of two posts that really get to the heart of the issue:
"But that situation is going to objectively create real bias. Especially against a Russian player in Malkin, who is already being underrated to meme-like levels"
"The net result of a board process is the same, you get guys like Malkin rated low and some North American players rated higher than they should be".
"Malkin as a Russian is going to be lower down on a list made by North American HFBoards users than he should be".
That's what it's all about, isn't it? It's clear from your post history that Malkin is one of your favourite players. (There's nothing wrong with that - we all have our favourites). But if you think Malkin was ranked too low, explain why. (That should be easy, if he's "underrated to meme-like levels").
If there's evidence of anti-Russian/Soviet/European bias in the results, tell us. If the 2018/19 version of the list is flawed, we'll want to make the nexessary corrections in future editions. So far, you haven't provided any evidence of this bias. Your entire response sounds like sour grapes because you don't like how one of your favourite players was ranked. You should either provide evidence of the bias, or you should withraw your statement.
