Top-200 Hockey Players of All-Time - Round 2, Vote 4
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The Macho King
Back* to Back** World Champion
- Jun 22, 2011
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I don’t know that I like these percentages.
It’s been mentioned in previous threads that Stastny was more PP-reliant than, say, Norm Ullman, and thus, he wasn’t as good an ES scorer, because of percentages. To me, that’s just a wrong answer. By correctly eschewing raw totals that would benefit an 80s guy, we’re using PP Points % that benefit a 60s guy. Stastny was one of the better ES scorers of his day.
We can recognize an ES surge from a 2nd line guy with a great 1st liner who preoccupies the opposition, like Nicholls 89, or Jagr 96. Perhaps because we just learned of the numbers, we’re still in awe of the 2nd line ESP totals, so we haven’t noticed that with Ullman’s ESP totals behind Gordie Howe, or Henri Richard’s ES scoring numbers behind Jean Beliveau. (We kind of already knew about Mikita and Hull being great on separate lines, so Mikita racking up a lot of ES points doesn’t exceed expectations in the same way.)
While Stastny became more PP-reliant from 85-86 onwards, for his first five years he’s one of only 4 players (Gretzky, Bossy, Kurri) to average over 1.0 ESPPG. He was one of 5 players to hit 85+ ES points 3 times ever (Gretzky, Lafleur, Bossy, Trottier. While raw totals are high because of their era, I didn’t want to limit the time frame to Stastny’s best years just to artificially boost Stastny’s case, or draw the line at 86 ES points to cut out Bossy). Stastny was one of the more dangerous ES players of his day, and his ES scoring was well above the Savards and Hawerchuks, and despite the presented percentages, above peak Gilbert Perreault too.
tarheelhockey
Offside Review Specialist
This is a long-ish post on the context of Quackenbush's HHOF wait, which will ultimately end up where you left it -- a head-to-head with Stewart. Anyone who doesn't take HHOF induction seriously as a way to compare players can probably just skip these paragraphs.
For perspective, here's how HHOF inductions played out for defensemen during Quack's eligibility period:
Georges Boucher - 1960
Sylvio Mantha - 1960
Hap Day - 1961
Joe Hall - 1961
Harry Cameron - 1962
Jack Ruttan - 1962
Joe Simpson - 1962
Phat Wilson - 1962
Earl Seibert - 1963
Jack Stewart - 1964
Red Horner - 1965
Butch Bouchard - 1966
Babe Pratt - 1966
Ken Reardon - 1966
Bill Gadsby - 1970
Tom Johnson - 1970
Doug Harvey - 1973
Art Coulter - 1974
Pierre Pilote - 1975
Bill Quackenbush - 1976
(I didn't include a few guys like Kelly, Noble, Siebert, Goodfellow who split their time between F and D)
Now, that's obviously a ton of guys who went in ahead of Quackenbush during his eligibility. That does indeed tell us something about how obviously worthy he was in the minds of the HHOF at that time.
But, there's also an odd timing factor to be taken into consideration here. The early 1960s were the era of mass-inductions for the sake of filling the Hall with old-timers. 1962 alone had 33 inductees, of whom the majority were pre-NHL'ers and only 1 (Sweeney Schriner) played into the 1940s. And then the early 1970s featured a slew of 50s-era inductions as those players finished their expansion-era retirement tours. What's missing in between are the guys who played between the 30s and the 50s, who didn't receive nearly the depth of HOF consideration that one would normally see over a 15-year period.
As a result of the way those factors fell into place, there were only 4 defensemen inducted who would be considered peers of Quackenbush: Bouchard, Gadsby, Reardon, Stewart. The first two make sense in terms of just being a better hockey player (Gadsby, #90 on our list) or Cup counting/WWII career inflation (Bouchard). The latter two give us some interesting parallels to consider against Quackenbush, and why they may have gone in sooner.
Which is all to say, the long HHOF wait is not as much of a negative as it looks superficially. It really kind of narrows down to Stewart and Reardon getting in a few years earlier.
tarheelhockey
Offside Review Specialist
Again, media guides are not written by historians. We have another thread on here where the Bruins' media guide is missing three captains, even after the error has been pointed out. It's a marketing manual intended for distribution to the press, not a history book.
Why is Liscombe mentioned? Probably because he was a career Wing who not only won a Cup, but tied a playoff scoring record in the process. Someone who doesn't really care about second-tier characters in the franchise drama would still find Liscombe noteworthy, if only as a trivia question (which again is the purpose of media guides).
I think that's a pretty misleading characterization of the argument for Quackenbush. We have good reason to believe that he was the best, or very close to the best defenseman in the league in the late 40s. That's coming from primary media sources, teammates, awards recognition, historians.
Are we really projecting Lidstrom onto him? Maybe I'm forgetting something but I don't even remember that comparison being made in this project (I compared him to Slavin earlier... he's somewhere in between the two, because his offense is about the average between them). In his own right, Quackenbush was recognized as the best defender in the league while playing a clean positional game. We're not making that up or projecting it or misreading anything... that actually was his reputation. He was also known as a very smooth puckhandler and was one of the most prolific socring D in the league during his career... again, this is not projection but simply who he was as a player.
Re: being traded, Jack Adams made it completely clear that he didn't want to lose Quackenbush, but something had to be done to unclog the defensive logjam that had developed. It's not like people thought he had made an even swap of talent, or that it was a trade which would pay immediate dividends. It was taken as a very explicit trade of a surplus star defenseman to add a future star forward (which is how Babando was perceived at the time) with intent to lean hard on Stewart for the foreseeable future (which isn't how it played out) and turned out to require further moves that Adams couldn't have expected at that time. This happened in the context of the Wings being shallow at forward during consecutive playoff losses.
About a year later, Eddie Dorohoy talked about the trade in the press:
Now, Dorohoy was not a Red Wings insider and can't be said to speak for Adams. But this is the mentality that prevailed in the Original Six NHL. It also prevailed in the 1990s NHL and really up until the past 10 years or so. It's not a projection to say that it wasn't a particularly smart way to think about the game. Turns out positional defensemen really are very valuable and in some ways much more valuable than a counterpart of similar caliber who routinely takes himself off the ice with penalties. Once we started to see real objective analysis of the game, possession metrics as opposed to +/-, the value of positional D became extremely apparent. Jack Adams wouldn't have known that, he would have just known he had too many D and there was one guy who didn't entirely suit his idea of a hockey player. Thus, a downright bad trade of the sort that we rarely see (Joe Thornton comes to mind).
TheDevilMadeMe
Registered User
Yes, he was great in the 1994 postseason. But we are talking a guy who never once finished top 20 in NHL assists, something that even Brett Hull managed twice.
To prefer Bure to guys who put up more points (per-season or per-game) like Jackson and Stastny, I think you need to place a really high value on goals vs assists. AND a high emphasis on peak vs longevity (Bure only played enough complete seasons to finish top 20 in goals 5 times. Iginla and Hull, who were added already but not all that long ago, finished top 20 in goals 12 times each).
Yes, I'm looking back at the winger's project for these stats (actually, I'm trying to find posts on Jackson and Bentley, so far no luck, but not done yet).
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sr edler
gold is not reality
- Mar 20, 2010
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Not going to ask for the seasons here (though I suspect one of them could be in the very early 90s before the great European influx), but this seems very arbitrary as Bure had better individual assist totals both in the regular season and the post-season than Hull. That's the stats, but the eye test also tells me Hull obviously wasn't a better playmaker than Bure. I'm not claiming Bure was this great playmaker, by the way, I think that's where a player like Jagr for instance leaves Bure in the dust offensively speaking. Brett Hull is certainly not though, leaving Bure in any sort of dust with any sort of playmaking.
I think Bure's strength was that he created stuff (scoring chances) out of nowhere with his skating & stick-handling. He did that for himself, but also for his teammates. He had good vision & was a good passer, but he wasn't a guy who slowed down the play a lot like say Mogilny could do.
He was called “Lidstrom-lite” in Vote 1 and Vote 3. Last round a parallel was drawn between Lidstrom/Konstantinov and Quackenbush/Stewart (because voters favored Konstantinov) that didn’t necessarily land due to their respective ESGA essentially backing the voters’ choice of Konstantinov. So yeah, I think there’s some projection going on.
Like this:
is literally projecting some statistical breakdowns from current defensemen onto Quackenbush and saying Jack Adams was wrong.
Just like with the Konstantinov example from the 1997 Red Wings, we’re fortunate to have Chelios, Pronger, and Stevens in recent decades with ESGA numbers that were consistently better than their non-violent peers. Intimidation didn’t stop working once we had better statistical accounting. Now that doesn’t mean Stewart necessarily would have had excellent numbers in that regard, and that’s the point - we don’t know, so we shouldn’t project against contemporary opinion.
... however we have a quote referencing players purposefully going towards Quackenbush out of fear of Stewart, and we’re not seeing that as a positive for Stewart? He was capable of conditioning the opposition.
It’s like trying to force the All-Star voting into a Norris-compatible system; too many assumptions are being made here to override the opinion of Stewart over Quackenbush that persists outside of HOH.
TheDevilMadeMe
Registered User
Busher Jackson and Doug Bentley beyond the offense
(reposted from the HOH wingers project) with links to ATD profiles
Harvey "Busher" Jackson
Big, fast, exciting, aggressive, physical, and didn't backcheck.
Full bio here: ATD 2013 BIO Thread (quotes, stats, pics, sources, everything)
As for Jackson's lack of back checking, both the Jackson-Primeau-Conacher and Jackson-Apps-Drillon lines were broken up due to lack of back checking. In particular, this was said when the Jackson-Apps-Drillon line was broken up:
The Calgary Daily Herald - Google News Archive Search
Gordie Drillon is famously a guy who didn't backcheck, so this is pretty damning as a weakness.
In the wingers project, it was specifically mentioned that Jackson was moved to D during the 1943 playoffs as the Bruins (his team at the time) were the first team decimated by players leaving for the military.
Before the advent of the Red Line in 1944, I don't think that skating was that important to playing defense if the player wasn't rushing, so it wasn't unheard of for older guys to be moved to D when they got slow and their team needed another body back there.
Doug Bentley
Lightning-fast two-way player. Lack of size was his big weakness.
Full bio here: ATD 2014 - the Bios Thread
Two additional worthwhile posts from the wingers project;
@overpass argued that Bentley's lack of size may have hurt his defensive results, even as he was known as a strong backchecker:
@tarheelhockey did an analysis of Bentley's lack of playoff success during the wingers project. Full analysis here: Round 2, Vote 6 (HOH Top Wingers)
Tarheel's conclusion:
(reposted from the HOH wingers project) with links to ATD profiles
Harvey "Busher" Jackson
Big, fast, exciting, aggressive, physical, and didn't backcheck.
Red Barnett said:
legendsofhockey said:
Border Cities Star said:
Full bio here: ATD 2013 BIO Thread (quotes, stats, pics, sources, everything)
As for Jackson's lack of back checking, both the Jackson-Primeau-Conacher and Jackson-Apps-Drillon lines were broken up due to lack of back checking. In particular, this was said when the Jackson-Apps-Drillon line was broken up:
The Calgary Daily Herald - Google News Archive Search
Gordie Drillon is famously a guy who didn't backcheck, so this is pretty damning as a weakness.
In the wingers project, it was specifically mentioned that Jackson was moved to D during the 1943 playoffs as the Bruins (his team at the time) were the first team decimated by players leaving for the military.
Before the advent of the Red Line in 1944, I don't think that skating was that important to playing defense if the player wasn't rushing, so it wasn't unheard of for older guys to be moved to D when they got slow and their team needed another body back there.
Doug Bentley
Lightning-fast two-way player. Lack of size was his big weakness.
legendsofhockey said:
Great Left Wingers: Stories of Hockey's Golden Age said:
Full bio here: ATD 2014 - the Bios Thread
Two additional worthwhile posts from the wingers project;
@overpass argued that Bentley's lack of size may have hurt his defensive results, even as he was known as a strong backchecker:
@tarheelhockey did an analysis of Bentley's lack of playoff success during the wingers project. Full analysis here: Round 2, Vote 6 (HOH Top Wingers)
Tarheel's conclusion:
tarheelhockey said:
Dennis Bonvie
Registered User
This is kind of like condemning Joe Thornton for not scoring goals. Joe did come in 12th and 17th in two of his 18 seasons that he played over 70 games.
Of course Bure only played 5 seasons with over 70 games played. But he scored over 50 goals in each of them. So is it really of any significance what so ever that Bure never crack the top 20 for assists?
The Macho King
Back* to Back** World Champion
- Jun 22, 2011
- 48,602
- 30,472
I think there's a ... bias? toward players that make the players around them better. I think it *can* occur with a goal scorer - Backstrom benefited from playing with Ovi, for instance.
With Bure - is there really a sign of that? And the secondary question - should that matter?
One comparison I want to make here - is Bure that much better than Stamkos? Two Rockets, some health issues, limited postseason success (although Bure has certainly outperformed him there to date). Two AS versus 3 (but Stamkos at a much deeper position). Closeish in PPG despite Bure getting some peak seasons before the DPE. Stamkos actually has him beat on the longevity side too with about 100 more games played to date.
There are other factors setting Bure apart from Stamkos (Stamkos playing with two of the three best playmaking wingers of the decade among them), but I don't think there's a wide gap between them, so if you're considering Bure now, Stamkos can't be far behind.
This is a long way of me getting to this point - it's too early for Stamkos. I think it's too early for Bure as well.
Professor What
Registered User
Not to mention that you have to have teammates who are scoring goals...
*looks at 2000-01 team stats again and shakes head in disbelief at futility of teammates*
I don’t know that it would necessarily be too early for Stamkos.
I mean... strictly in terms of players with disappointing playoff resumes... I’d rather have a Center with back-to-back Lindsay nominations who finished top-4 in All-Star voting six times in a 30-team league than a Defenseman who finished top-4 in All-Star voting five times in post-war O6.
We’re pretty much out of players with the really good resumes. I don’t think we’ll have a round where we won’t be asking about Player X, Player Y, and Player Z.
The important thing to remember is that just because someone compares well with an eligible player (like Stamkos would for Bure) doesn’t mean we necessarily have to hold back that player just because they’re similar. Stamkos could potentially be better than everyone this round, even if it wouldn’t make for an obvious comparison like Bure does.
Similarly, I would say we shouldn’t hold back Quackenbush just because Victor Hedman is already better (but instead because he’s not one of the five best eligible players).
Dennis Bonvie
Registered User
As a voter, I can only compare Bure to who he's up against this round.
TheDevilMadeMe
Registered User
Joe Thornton put up points in a way Bure never did, including an Art Ross and a 2nd place finish. Points being just goals + assists (as you know).
I know you prefer goal scorers in most cases, but IMO, when we are talking about elite players (like everyone who will ever be on this list), I think assists are nearly as valuable.
The Macho King
Back* to Back** World Champion
- Jun 22, 2011
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I didnt mean to distract the issue.
I'll put it simpler. 700 games in 12 seasons in an era marked by longevity.
You're not doing your team any favors in the press box. He makes Forsberg look like an iron man.
Edit: I made that comparison glibly and then looked it up and their GP is almost identical. So I withdraw that comparison.
Is it? Jagr was the only guy on the Pond of Dreams over 1000 games.
Lindros hit 760. Kariya hit 989. Bure hit 702.
Non-ponders: Forsberg hit 708. Selanne would have stopped at 879 before the lockout gave him a window of time for reconstructive surgery. Sakic and Fedorov fared better.
I think there’s a pretty good argument for being lenient towards DPE forwards since half of the great ones had their careers disrupted.
The Macho King
Back* to Back** World Champion
- Jun 22, 2011
- 48,602
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I'm not familiar with Pond of Dreams as a reference.
But you have Sakic, Yzerman Andreychuk, Jagr, Selanne, Francis, as guys who played in the same era with a lot more GP.
Yozhik v tumane
Registered User
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This seems like an incredibly odd thing to say in regards to the top forwards of the dead puck era.
Thank you.
tarheelhockey
Offside Review Specialist
I was the one who made the second of those comparisons, and it wasn’t at all because I think Quackenbush = Lidstrom. It was because I was pointing out a modern duo where there was one highly physical and one highly non-physical partner. Lidstrom/Konstantinov was the first that came to mind which I thought everyone would remember clearly. I thought that was clear at the time, I guess it wasn’t?
In any case, “Lidstrom-lite” doesn’t seem like an unfair label for Quackenbush stylistically. That doesn’t mean we’re projecting anything onto him, just pointing out what type of game he played while recognizing a clear difference in caliber (hence the “lite”). Is there an objection to that? Do you think he didn’t play a Lidstrom-like game?
It’s saying, and I think very rightly, that for decades a wrong-headed attitude prevailed about the value of physical engagement compared to positional engagement. There is a lot of evidence that physically engaging a winger on the rush is a bad idea, and not a lot of evidence to the contrary. Especially when the counterpoint is “well what if the defenseman commits a major penalty!”
Why would we count any of this stuff as a negative on Stewart? We don’t have to knock Quackenbush down to build a case for Stewart, or vice versa. I’d like to give them both a fair shake here.
Again you’re saying this as if we just looked at award voting and started drawing conclusions. There’s a lot more of a paper trail than that.
Dennis Bonvie
Registered User
The Macho King
Back* to Back** World Champion
- Jun 22, 2011
- 48,602
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It affects your accomplishments as a player. And I would say getting hurt doesn't but not staying healthy does, if that makes sense.
Dennis Bonvie
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Dennis Bonvie
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Hockey Outsider
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This was from a short film from 2000, filmed north of Toronto. It showed the three greatest forwards in history and what was supposed to the superstars of the next generation - Bure, Kariya, Jagr, Lindros. Not that it's proof of anything (Sakic, Forsberg, Fedorov, Selanne etc easily could have been included), but it's a really impressive photo (and speaks to how highly those four were regarded - even if some of their peers were arguably just as deserving).
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