Was Ziggy Palffy an elite talent?

[wetcoast]

With all these descriptive terms, like "elite", it depends a bit on what you put into them yourself, but Palffy was definitely an upper echelon talent, though obviously not on a say Jagr type of level, or even a Bure or Selänne level.

But it's funny if you've seen those old photos of Palffy in juniors where he wears #68 and sports the exact same mullet as Jagr. He looks just like Jagr, except the size.

Perhaps if he had Jagr's size, he could have been really dominant. But I guess you can play that hypothetical game with most players. Size comes with both pros and cons, and you need to be able to adapt your game accordingly.

But I always found Palffy way more offensively well-rounded than countrymen such as Bondra and later Gaborik. He couldn't just score goals, but make plays and drive a line properly as well. I would also prefer him in front of someone like Gartner, fairly easily.

If the thread question was "Was Palffy more elite than Gartner?" then I would say, yeah, he was.

Agree with alot of this but even at his peak 3 years he was only 6th in goals and 8th in points.

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Then injuries happen and he gets traded to LA where he does quite well but injuries every year, then lockout plays a half season with Pittsburg with limited PP TOI, at a PPG level then leaves for good.

Very good player when healthy but elite seems like a stretch.

 

[wetcoast]

Speaking of 50 goal seasons, can anyone enlighten me as to what happened in 1996-97, when Palffy put up a career high 48 goals, but only 6 (six!) were on the powerplay? It's sandwiched by two years of 17 PPG. He had 38 at even-strength (the league leader Tkachuk had 41) and just a couple extra goals on the power play and he's got himself a 50 goal season.

Whatever setup the Islanders were using Milbury that season had Palffy shifting to more of a passing role on the powerplay (6 goals and 15 assists with the extra man, vs 38 and 25 at EV). It looks like just 21 of his 90 points were with the extra man. Without summoning PNEP, that seems like a very low percentage for a guy with 90 points.

Palffy definitely excelled off the rush, he's in that next tier of guys below McDavid and Bure for me when he enters the zone with speed and 1 or zero defensemen back, but he could be very effective on the powerplay as well (evidenced by the surrounding seasons). Such a weird oddity, and one that cost him his best shot at 50 goals.

96-97 the NYI PP just sucked with only 48 PPG (18th) , the year before they had 70 (16th) and after was 61 (12th).

 

[vadim sharifijanov]

i don’t know if i buy the linemates argument. from my memory he was kind of the same whether it was travis green or plumbers in LA or the LAPD line.

but let me run some numbers to see:

1996: breakthrough year, 87 pts looks really good but that was the last super high scoring year and it was only 23rd in league scoring. common linemates were travis green and wendel clark. the PP is a weird grab bag of guys you don’t associate with the islanders, including clark, bertuzzi, schneider, and mccabe.

1997: league scoring craters, palffy’s 90 pts is 8th in the league. first true elite year. played with smolinski mostly, but green early on and reichel at the end. common wingers were derek king and niklas andersson. scored disproportionately at ES, vs the previous year.

1998: 5th in pts, so a very different 87 pts than he scored two years earlier. played a lot with reichel and sergei nemchinov, but also green, smolinski, tom chorske, mariuxz czerkawski, and eventually linden. much more balanced ES/PP year.

then two years where he missed a lot of time but scored at a pt/game pace, placing him 13th in pts/game over those two years cumulative. played a lot with mariusz czerkawski as his opposite winger in his last islanders year rotating between every possible center, then stumpel and robitaille in his first LA year. (note that stumpel had placed in the top ten in scoring a couple years earlier, and robitaille had back to back top ten in goals seasons the year before he was palffy’s linemate, as well as in his first year with him).

2001: a fabulous year, again with robitaille and, when healthy, stumpel. 9th in scoring even though he missed nine games, 4th in pts/game. he did most of his damage on the PP (outside of the top 35 in ES scoring), but had something really special with robitaille, stumpel, and LA’s amazing revolving door of PP QBs: blake, schneider, and visnovsky — modry would join the PP the following season). robitaille finished one pt back of league lead in PP scoring.

2002: the LAPD year. palffy missed 20 games, but only barely cracked the top 20 in pts/game and was well below a pt/game. allison scored at almost exactly a pt/game, finishing in the top ten. deadmarsh, given consistent first line opportunities, had his best statistical year.

in the playoffs, they gave the avalanche a scare. deadmarsh got hurt in game four and missed the rest of the seven game series, allison only had one pt in the last four games and palffy had two. but here was the first three games with all three healthy:

palffy: 4 goals, 3 assists​

allison: 2 goals, 3 assists​

deadmarsh: 1 goal, 3 assists​

2003: iirc, in addition the previous year’s playoffs, this is the LAPD line we actually remember. when they were all healthy at the same time they were dynamite. they were good the year before in the regular season, but here they were dominant. but it was only a literal handful of games. through the beginning of the season they each got hurt at different times. starting in game three of the season, palffy missed two weeks. by the time he came back, allison was out until december. a couple weeks later, deadmarsh also got hurt, and missed almost a month. but there was a five game stretch from december 7 to december 15, the only run of games all three played in at the same time that year.

palffy: 4 goals, 5 assists​

allison: 1 goal, 6 assists​

deadmarsh: 4 goals, 1 assist​

it was just eight days, but it was tantalizing. that last game, a 3-2 loss to phoenix, was the last game of deadmarsh’s career. allison played three more games before he got hurt again, and had just one more small stretch after that before shutting it down for the year.

but this is what the rest of the year looked like for palffy:

after dec 15: 60 pts in 52 games, 8th in scoring (post-deadmarsh)​

after jan 15: 48 pts in 38 games, 5th in scoring​

after jan 25: 41 pts in 33 games, 8th in scoring (post-allison)​

​

his absolute best stretch was 11 goals, 22 pts in 13 games between jan 28 and feb 25, second behind only forsberg, and LA went 8-4 in that span.

ultimately, he slowed down, scoring at exactly one pt/game after feb 25. and the kings did also miss the playoffs badly. but he finished the year 10th in pts (missed eight games), 6th in ES scoring, 10th in pts/game. i had him as the third most valuable player in the league that year, after giguere and forsberg, in that order.

and he played with nobody. even smolinski missed a lot of time, so it was derek armstrong, rookie alex frolov (31 pts on the season), and eric belanger.

all to say, all this i think shows that palffy was the same volume scorer whether he’s playing with excellent linemates, good linemates, ok linemates, and sub-expansion level first liners.

 

[The Panther]

He was definitely an elite talent, yes. He played for 3 NHL clubs, all pretty bad to mediocre (though L.A. had a strong-ish stretch for three seasons in his prime). And in his career, only three times in eleven seasons did he play for clubs that were top-15 in offense. (And even when L.A was scoring relatively well, it was the peak of the DPE, which means they scored, like, 8 more goals than the 20th best club...)

His NHL goals-per-game finishes are: 5, 6, 8, 9, 9. (That's more top-10 finishes than, say, Jarome Iginla had in his entire career, believe it or not!)

Whether or not he had an "elite career" is more debatable, I guess, due to his shortened NHL career, his poor-ish clubs, and his paltry 24 career playoff games.

 

[Boxscore]

He got a bit lost among Jagr, Selanne, Forsberg, Sundin, Fedorov, Mogilny, Bure, Modano, Roenick, LeClair, Tkacuk, Lindros, Kariya, Sakic, Turgeon, etc.

This ^. When I think of that era, all of those guys come to mind immediately while Palffy is an afterthought (and not justifiably so). Palffy was uber-talented... a wizard with the puck... and blessed with a great shot and wheels. Yet, my initial recollection and perception of him is on par with other unheralded talents like Alex Zhamnov... and not the titans you mentioned above. And, yes, Palffy was better than Zhamnov but rarely gets his just due.

 

[The Pale King]