Which Suter is better: Gary or Ryan?
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Ryan is a much better all around player then Gary, especially since going to the Wild. While on Nashville you might make a case for it being much closer.
BraveCanadian
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- Jun 30, 2010
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Ryan imo
Guy soaks up minutes like a beast.
Plus Gary is a puke who ruined Gretzky and Kariya with goon moves.
Guy soaks up minutes like a beast.
Plus Gary is a puke who ruined Gretzky and Kariya with goon moves.
Horvath Broncos
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- Aug 21, 2013
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Gary had a way tougher competition though. But I still go with Ryan whom I really think has been pretty underrated mostly because he was in the shadow of Shea Weber for so long.
vadim sharifijanov
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i don't follow the preds, but by the '11 playoffs at the very latest, ryan was playing at a higher level than uncle gary ever did.
tell me about it. in his best norris year (3rd or 4th, i believe; buoyed by monster numbers a la '93 hatcher or '94 zubov), he was the third best d-man on his own friggin' team.
era or not, gary is probably a top ten pp point man all-time. ryan isn't even top ten in the league right now. so that's not remotely close. but gary's defensive abilities are overstated because he often had great defensive partners and big +/- numbers, and for some reason people often confuse him being a cheap sob with being good defensively; the difference between gary and ryan defensively, if you account for the pp being a relatively small % of the game, is even bigger. (and at es, i think they're pretty close offensively.)
Fred Taylor
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JaysCyYoung
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Gary Suter was never considered the best defenceman in the league. Ryan certainly has been in that discussion on more than one occasion for multiple seasons now and IMO he clearly should have won the Norris in 2012-13.
Based on his stats, a case could be made that Gary deserves consideration for the Hall of Fame
845 points in 1145 puts him 14th all-time among D-men
845 points in 1145 puts him 14th all-time among D-men
TheDevilMadeMe
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Norris voting
Gary
87-88: 3rd
88-89: 7th
92-93: 8th
Ryan
09-10: 11th
11-12: 8th
12-13: 2nd
13-14: 4th/5th*
*Based on already released votes
The Norris voting makes it look like a small advantage to Ryan, but I think it's greater than that. In Nashville, Ryan was in the perfect situation to be underrated by the voting - overshadowed by the flashier Weber, and generally played the stay-at-home role which hurt his hockey card numbers. While Gary played a very flashy offensive-first, hard-hitting style.
Gary
87-88: 3rd
88-89: 7th
92-93: 8th
Ryan
09-10: 11th
11-12: 8th
12-13: 2nd
13-14: 4th/5th*
*Based on already released votes
The Norris voting makes it look like a small advantage to Ryan, but I think it's greater than that. In Nashville, Ryan was in the perfect situation to be underrated by the voting - overshadowed by the flashier Weber, and generally played the stay-at-home role which hurt his hockey card numbers. While Gary played a very flashy offensive-first, hard-hitting style.
Ryan has the better peak, even with any competition differences, and even on the career front he is closing in fast on Ryan.
Terry Yake
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- Aug 5, 2013
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i hated gary suter with a passion during his playing days for his hit on kariya
but i'm a big fan of ryan suter and he's by far the better of the 2
but i'm a big fan of ryan suter and he's by far the better of the 2
With all due respect to today's players, I've never been so underwhelmed by a particular class of players as I have with today's defensemen. Most get their points. Most can pretend like they know how to play the position. But, so few of them are so adept at both ends of the ice that they can literally dictate the game. I'm specifically talking about players like Lidstrom, and Pronger.
Yes, a little silly to say "Gary Suter was never considered the best defenceman in the league" when his contemporaries were Ray Bourque, Chris Chelios, Paul Coffey, Brian Leetch, Al MacInnis, etc. Ryan Suter wouldn't get a sniff of "best defenceman in the league" talk if he played then either.
JaysCyYoung
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He'd be a lot closer to that respective class of defenders than Gary was. And while you can mock the logic of using the "best" statement as a measure of quality, it's always included in the Bill James Hall of Fame standard list of questions for a reason: it's a measure of respective dominance against one's peers, even if they are competing against a weaker class than previous eras.
Ryan's significantly better than Gary in any respect and most people would assent to that statement.
JaysCyYoung
Registered User
I agree that this is a weaker collection of top-end defensive talent than we've seen in many decades. Probably not since the early to mid 1960s has the collection of high-end defencemen been this lacking.
However, it bears noting that Lidstrom is a top ten, arguably top five (some people place him as high as second) defenceman of all-time and Pronger probably a top twenty. It's not exactly fair to compare the current crop of youngsters, most of whom haven't established any semblance of a legacy, to previous classes of players. Especially when the latter have established legacies and some years have passed between their playing days and now to allow for sober reflection and judgement on their accomplishments. We also tend to be harsher judgement-wise on our contemporaries than past players as a general rule.
I also believe that, as alluded to in the Crosby thread, the rapid proliferation of real-time statistics, social media scrutiny, and 24/7 sports coverage has resulted in every individual player's flaws and shortcomings becoming collectively blown out of proportion such that their qualities are overlooked or under appreciated. There's also the fact that we are in a bit of a generational transition as far as defencemen go. With guys like a possible all-time great in Aaron Ekblad on the horizon, Seth Jones already playing in the NHL, and Erik Karlsson poised to become the most dominant offensive defender relative to his peers since Paul Coffey I think that any such talk about the current weak class of defencemen remaining static for the foreseeable future is premature.
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JaysCyYoung
Registered User
Whatever helps you sleep at night.
What does this even mean?
What exactly do you find amusing about the fact that Ryan fared better against his competitors than Gary? I understand that the quality of competition was higher in Gary's period amongst his peers, but that doesn't mean Ryan wouldn't have performed well.
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Pominville Knows
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Gary might not have been on yearly par with Bourque and the dudes, but he was still a quality defenceman, not only on the PP where he was world elite, and offensively overall where he was All-Star material. He had a defensive game, was not a Mike Green.
- Jan 22, 2007
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It's not just defensive talent, it's talent in general. Hockey has become so mass-produced and "overcoached", that the majority of today's players are robotic table hockey players, except for a small group of top-end players. Today's hockey lacks the creativity, spontaneity and artistic feel it used to have in decades past. The dead puck era, trapping NHL started the downhill climb. Now players are overcoached to always "make the safe play" and limit the risk-taking. It makes for boring hockey. It's refreshing to see players like Datsyuk, Kane and Karlsson dazzle on occasion and remind us all why we love this game so much.
I think Ryan suffers from this too. He is a very meat and potatoes type of player. Rock solid, intelligent, mistake-free and very skilled. His first pass is a huge asset but he lacks the flair of his uncle Gary and doesn't pack a big shot from the point or destroy people with checks.
And, as others said, Gary was competing against peers like Coffey, Bourque, Lidstrom, Leetch, Chelios, MacInnis, Pronger, Blake and others. Ryan isn't fighting for Norris' and All-Star ballots against those type of animals.
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tony d
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vadim sharifijanov
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