Hall of Not Bad, Volume 5: Tyson Kohler (and Essian Ravening!)

[Gustav 6,136]

"I don't think it's a question of if he'll make it, it's mostly just when."

-Devise

 

"Kohler should be in"

-Corco

 

 

These are taken from the replies of a media spot I wrote a few years ago, in which I did mostly the same thing I've been doing with this series--take a look at someone who isn't in the VHL Hall of Fame and wonder why. Also at least twice in those years, I've seen a nice little trivia question pop up--"who has the highest career point total out of all players to never be inducted to the HoF?" And while there's always going to be someone who fits in that category, the answer has always been the same: Tyson Kohler. This actually isn't true at the time of writing, because Jerome Reinhart is now up for his second season of eligibility, but I'd imagine that he's going to be in pretty soon. As far as I'm concerned, the title is still effectively Kohler's. And I'm here to more or less rewrite that media spot, but to do it a little bit better and put it in Hall of Not Bad format.

 

One out of an extensive line of players from the @Kendrick agency, Kohler takes us all the way back to the S48 class. He'd spend the first three seasons of his career with the Express before moving to Calgary in S51--and that was where his career would take off. For the next four seasons, Kohler would break both 50 goals and 100 points, and would spend the remainder of his career tearing it up on both Calgary and Stockholm. Twice, he put up a rating of +95, and as a pure scorer, generally did a great job of staying out of the penalty box. He'd win the Funk for his rapid improvement in S51, and lead two teams to a Victory Cup, though he'd never see a championship. He's arguably low-hanging fruit for this series, as his point total and long-standing status on the HoF ballot make him an obvious candidate, perhaps even more so than Jakab Holik...but that also means that the Hall of Not Bad wouldn't be complete without him. 

 

As usual in a HoNB article, we'll be comparing our main subject to multiple different players, both in and out of the VHL Hall of Fame. Those players are as follows:

• Diana Maxwell: a Hall of Fame player. From the S50 class, Maxwell started off in Stockholm but was easily best known as the heart and soul of the New York Americans over the better part of that decade. In much the same way as Kohler, Maxwell would take off and put up four consecutive 100-plus-point seasons after her rookie contract was up. In total, Maxwell would only score 4 more points than Kohler, but has a far more extensive award cabinet--two each of the Cup, the Brooks, and the Szatkowski, plus playoff MVP in S53.
• Pietro Maximoff: a Hall of Fame player. Another member of the "has four 100-point seasons" club, Maximoff played half a career in Riga, starting in S49, before spending the second half between three different teams. Winning the Funk a season after Kohler, that was far from the extent of it--also coming away with two championships, Maximoff would take a diverse array of individual awards during both his and Kohler's careers.
• Theo Axelsson: a Hall of Fame player. We'll save some of the description for later, but Axelsson would also win two championships in a career starting in Calgary and ending in Helsinki. Although a solid offensive player, Axelsson's niche would be carved out a little bit differently than the others on this list--more on that later.
• Essian Ravenwing: NOT a Hall of Fame player. The next-best non-HoF scorer to Kohler, Ravenwing was a longtime teammate of Maxwell, also spending S50 with Stockholm and moving to New York for long thereafter. Unexpectedly, Ravenwing is the only player on this list to win the Cup three times, and also won the Mikka Virkkunen trophy as the league's most sportsmanlike player (back when it still existed) twice.

 

It's important to consider that each of these players is from either the S49 or the S50 class, one or two after Kohler. I don't think that's something that will make a large difference, but we'll talk about it a bit more later on. As I've touched upon in some of my other articles, the S50s were a really weird time for the league, but I don't see a clear "era shift" in these S50 players' stats as compared to Kohler's and I think it's mostly a fair comparison as far as career stats go.

 

Oh, and I won't be shrinking the graphs this time. That's made them blurry up to this point and they weren't all that bigger to begin with.

 

 

 

It's fair--extremely fair--to say that Kohler scored at a Hall of Fame level for the entire duration of his career. In fact, these are some of the prettiest, most "see-his-career-is-just-about-the-same"-est charts I've ever made. Kohler's and Maxwell's lines practically disappear into each other in some places, and it's safe to say that Kohler was clearly a better player than the next-best in Ravenwing--and though Ravenwing was a solid player, it's not even close. Offensively speaking, things look pretty great in terms of career totals.

 

What about defensively?

 

 

Here's why Axelsson is in, and this is the point I said I'd get to later when I brought him up. I'll point out that a player certainly doesn't need hit totals to be great (Maximoff is in purely based on offensive play, and Maxwell did do some stuff here but not enough for me to say that it made a difference), but a truly great physical forward warrants some recognition. While many players just tried to score, Axelsson did that pretty well and put up over 2,700 hits--that's averaging over 300 per season! He'd win the Boulet three times, something never done by other players in this article, and took home playoff MVP in Helsinki's S55 run. Axelsson stands out because his physical play made him great--it is the Hall of Fame, after all, and he simply made more headlines. 

 

Going off of that, everyone simply has more awards. To recap more extensively, we'll list them off:

 

Kohler:

0 Cups

1 Individual Award (Funk)

 

Maxwell:

2 Cups

5 Individual Awards (Kanou, 2x Szatkowski, 2x Brooks)

 

Maximoff:

2 Cups

5 Individual Awards (Stolzschweiger, Jonsson, Brooks, Szatkowski, Funk)

 

Axelsson:

2 Cups

4 Individual Awards (Kanou, 3x Boulet)

 

Ravenwing:

3 Cups

2 Individual Awards (2x Virkkunen)

 

No, this doesn't make Ravenwing better, but yes, this does mean something. The Hall of Fame isn't just a spreadsheet war. It's about recognizing the defining faces of their respective generations. Maxwell, Maximoff, and Axelsson inarguably are in that category, and we can tell that because we can look back at the players who were recognized as such in their time and notice that they were recognized repeatedly. And while this shouldn't rule Kohler out, either (more HoFers than you think never won an award), it's fair to say that Maxwell and Maximoff, who put up similar numbers to Kohler and in similar styles, deserved to get in first. And if we look at those seasons where Maxwell and Maximoff won their offensive awards, there's no room for arguing that there was just some stupid amount of luck that could have changed over one sim and that the wins could have just as easily gone to Kohler (yes, I tried to do this). Going over seasons where the players could be reasonably expected to be capped or close to capped (which I'll call 4th season or later), we get:

 

S52: Maximoff wins Szatkowski (most points), Brooks (most goals), and Funk (most improved)

Maximoff: 69 G | 70 A | 139 P

Kohler: 51 G | 52 A | 103 P

 

S54: Maxwell wins Szatkowski and Brooks

Maxwell: 60 G | 64 A | 124 P

Kohler: 54 G | 62 A | 116 P

 

S55: Maxwell wins Szatkowski and Brooks

Maxwell: 55 G | 61 A | 116 P

Kohler: 45 G | 46 A | 91 P

 

We can look at this in two different ways. First, Kohler during his peak seasons (his 116 in S54 was his second-highest) was easily outdueled by the other pure scorers. This is significant! On the other hand, we could just as easily adjust the criteria and do something unfair (or fair; that's a subjective statement!) like:

 

S51: Kohler wins Funk

Kohler: 58 G | 64 A | 122 P

Maximoff: 38 G | 36 A | 74 P

 

S57: Nobody wins Shit

Ravenwing: 44 G | 66 A | 110 P

Maxwell: 42 G | 45 A | 87 P

 

It's possible to twist stats any way you want, really; I could make Kohler look like a Hall of Famer if I wanted, but I'd like to look at it from all angles. I think it's mostly pointless to look at individual seasons against each other (at least, in this way), but I do think there's an important takeaway to be made in that Maximoff and Maxwell just had higher peaks than Kohler. That doesn't make their career stats any better, but it did make them stand out more.

 

Something else that's interesting is that every award here, save for the Funk, is an objective award. There's no voting committee, there's no public poll, no one ever decided that Maximoff or Maxwell should win anything in the regular season. No one won MVP, no one was voted most outstanding, and aside from a couple Maxwell seasons, only one player even tried to get voted top two-way. Now, that doesn't mean these awards didn't happen, or that they don't mean anything, but it does mean that there was some competition in these leading seasons. Leading the league in goals and points and not being recognized with an MVP or a Most Outstanding happened three times here, and in S52, both were won by another forward (Unassisted--yes, that's a player name, not a descriptor). It was just a high-scoring time in general.

 

After all that, why don't we summarize and compare a bit?

 

The case for Kohler: overall numbers. There's absolutely nothing to suggest, based on career totals, that Kohler shouldn't be in the Hall of Fame. He scored more than many HoF players (mine included) and his 4-point difference from Maxwell means absolutely nothing overall. He's clearly the best in his era that hasn't made it, and the difference between Kohler and Hall of Fame is far smaller than the difference between Kohler and not (Ravenwing). One could also justify his lack of top seasons (something I've seen used as a highly desired characteristic in BoG threads) by arguing that it shows more consistent play, and that a player shouldn't be penalized for playing more consistently. And that's something I'd agree with, for the record. I'd liken this to what I said about hits: putting up hits isn't necessary to be great, but a great player can become great by putting up hits. Winning awards, likewise, isn't necessary, but winning lots of awards is also something that speaks for itself. So, yes, it would have been nice if Kohler had won more awards, but it's perfectly arguable that he managed to be great without.

 

The case against: awards mean something. And Kohler never won a Cup. He was just as good as Maxwell and Maximoff, but they were more dominant. I also wasn't able to find a HoF player from the same era that Kohler can be argued to have beaten, like I've got in my article about Bo Boeser. We'll also consider that Kohler is the third-best in his draft class, behind defenseman Black Velvet and the aforementioned Unassisted--one of the greatest ever, who was too good to even be included in this article. All this in an era known for actives few and far between? It might stack up a bit too much. There's a limited selection of players in the era to begin with, so how much is too much?

 

Finally, as is the culmination of every one of these articles: is Tyson Kohler a Hall of Fame player?

 

I actually think so. I don't think someone needs to win a ton of awards to be a great player. In fact, one of my other favorite perennially-on-the-ballot players (Matty Socks, who will either end up in the HoF or the HoNB someday) doesn't have a single one. And while it would make sense to say that awards mean a lot and that the others deserve to be in over Kohler, I think there's a lot of emphasis on leading outright and not enough on just being a great player in general that hurts players like Kohler. Awards for the others are a great thing, and I think they speak for themselves as bonuses, but I also think that Kohler's play as a whole at least stacks up enough to put him in the same category as the Hall of Famers, even if it's not in the "surefire" category the others were. And there's clearly a line to be drawn after Kohler, too--no one is arguing that Ravenwing should be in (sorry). The main thing that gets in the way of my vote is that there just always seems to be a more deserving candidate on the ballot, though perhaps I could see him getting in if there's a sufficient push in a weaker class. We'll see what happens--Kohler has been a very interesting story to track behind the scenes, and I'm interested in seeing how that story ends.

 

Tyson Kohler has been on the Hall of Fame ballot for longer than I have been a VHL member. Once every handful of seasons, he gets a vote, and if I'm not mistaken (I'd check if the forum weren't acting up on me right now), there was one time he picked up two or three. Time will tell if he makes it in...or remains the answer to a trivia question.

 

 

Previous HoNB articles:

Volume 1: Alexander Pepper

Volume 2: Shawn Glade

Volume 3: Jakab Holik

Volume 4: Bo Boeser

 

Others mentioned: @scoop @OrbitingDeath  @der meister @solas @hedgehog337

[Gustav 6,136]

Update: well, heck, Kohler was removed from the ballot in S83! I've always just taken "he's in there somewhere" as a given and forgot about that. I guess it answers the question of "what's going to happen to him" pretty well--although it's kind of sad to see, I'm glad I can make him an official part of the Hall of Not Bad!

[OrbitingDeath 2,939]

#Justice4Kohler #BackOnTheBallot

[der meister 2,932]

What I got from this is that Ravenwing should be in the HoF, and I won't hear otherwise.

 

Honestly though, if Ravenwing was close-ish to the HoF, then Klose got absolutely robbed because Klose was my best player.

Edited May 23, 2023 by der meister

[solas 1,946]

 

I'm going to print out this graph and hang it on my wall.

[Gustav 6,136]

Week 2

[Gustav 6,136]

And 3

[ShawnGlade 1,003]

I still get PTSD flashbacks from this series