Greatest Players of All Time: A Graph

[Victor 10,940]

So I was a bit bored and didn't have any short article ideas so I made this: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12xp3wd8OWG_NB9JKJ4KjAVzusY8K6lzjMR1GSnaG_OM/edit?usp=sharing

Based on the thing I did at the start of 2019: https://vhlforum.com/forum/505-greatest-players-of-all-time-s64/

 

I was curious to see whether there was any one era when it was easier to be good and if the current generation was at a disadvantage. Keep in mind these are S64 articles so don't include the 4 likeliest players to join the ranking (Thompson, Cast, Stopko, Johnsson), although realistically they're likelier to join the top playoff performers list than any other.

 

Anyway, looks like the sweet spot was playing between S20 and S40. I'm not really sure why, the 20s had a fair amount of parity, enough for expansion. It kinda makes sense that the 30s were nice to the top players as there were more bad teams for a bit. Hence, you have 4 players drafted in S27 (Chershenko, Rafter, Incognito, Smalling), and then a few players around the same time (Rybak, Sullivan).

 

It doesn't really help to be from the high-scoring early days because there's now a bias against that so only the very best made the cut (Campbell, Labatte, Boulet, the real legends). It helped to be from the late 40s and 50s when things got so polarised you could put up the best stats AND have less competition - hence McAllister, Cornerstone, Wingate, the Cleganes, Velvet.

 

But right now we're in the equivalent of the early 40s when there was a similar amount of contenders. And you can see there's a bit of a gap there but then we got O'Malley, the 2nd best forward ever. Are we about to get an O'Malley? It does feel like someone is on the verge of exploding and dominating the league and all the chatter about how to adjust HOF discussions will become redundant.

 

Anyway, this was a bit of a pointless exercise but I wanted to do it back when I made the list, my brain just couldn't figure out how to best present it. And now I have. Happy 2020! Hope some of you nerds enjoy this x.

[Nykonax 1,564]

weird, dahlberg is missing