Happy 64th Birthday Bobby Orr....the greatest hockey player ever

It's an interesting argument, and a compelling one, but just as impressive is the fact that Orr won not one but two scoring championships as a defenceman.

When Orr broke in, defencemen weren't supposed to join rushes, let alone lead them. He completely revolutionalized the way the game is played.

 

Yer drafting off my heat, Double J!

 

I'll fix that.

When it was best against best, including the WHA and the rest of the world - the 1976 Canada Cup - he played on one leg and was the best player on the ice. He was deservedly named the MVP.

He also won the first of his scoring titles and a big chunk of his trophies, including all three of his MVP awards and both of his Stanley Cups and Conn Smythe Trophies, before the WHA came along.

Greatest of all time.

 

It'd been interesting to see how Orr would have done without the knee problems, how he would have aged on the ice. Of course, Gretzky managed to have longevity, and that has to be rewarded somewhat. And the 12-14 team NHL without the influx of Europeans was probably not as deep as the 21-26 team NHL with the Europeans that Gretzky played in. Instead of facing a bunch of Petrovs, Tretiaks, Nillsons and Stastnys, Orr faced a bunch of Dave Balons and Walt McKechnies.

That said, Orr refusing to take the Blackhawks' money is one of the most admirable things an athlete has done.

 

Sirs, Madames,

Mario was the most talented and would have been the best if hockey interested him.

YHS. etc

 

As much as Orr revolutionized the game for defencemen Gretzky did the same for offence, he took it to a level that hadn't been seen before or since.

In just his third season in the NHL he broke the NHL's single season goal-scoring record, and not by being a giant and hanging out in the slot as Esposito did to set the mark. He did it with skill and with an unrivaled level of vision and anticipation. At 6'0" 175 pounds, he was never considered a physical specimen. He helped take the game from the alleys to the masses and he did it with the entire sports world looking for really the first time in an evolving media world. He was the game's greatest pitchman and made the sport relevant across North America as opposed to just Canada and northern NHL markets in the states. As much as anything he was playing with probably more pressure on his shoulders in the game's history than any one player up until Crosby arrived on the scene.

On the ice he his list of records is longer than any other player in any other sport. Hell, he showed you could attack while killing penalties with a record 73 career shorthanded goals. Many of his records are so extreme, most of them will never be touched. He was more than just a setup man, he was also the game's most prolific scorer, and it's not even close. In the NHL against the best players in the world he scored 894 goals -- number two on that list of course is Howe with 801 goals who needed almost 300 more NHL games to set the mark. And in the playoff he was arguably at his best with 382 points. Second on that list is Mark Messier with 295 points.

He also excelled in the international ring, leading the world juniors in scoring as a 16-year-old and the youngest player to play in the tournament, he then led the Canada Cup tournament (against the best pros from around the world, including Russia) four times. In pros against pros international play (Canada Cup, World Cup, Pro Olympics) he has more goals (20) assists (28) and points (48) than any other player in the sport, not just the NHL.

Was he physical (and I love the physical game more than most)? no but he showed he didn't have to be. One of the great lines from Glen Sather about Gretzky was that trying to hit him is like trying to hit confetti. He, along with the rest of the 80s Oilers, forced other NHL teams to realize that they needed defencemen who were not pylons. While he wasn't the best skater in the league, he certainly was no slouch himself. And yes he benefited from playing in the high flying 80s, but he was by far the best player in the league, he had no real peer.

Don't get me wrong, I like Orr a lot, but I feel Gretzky gets shortchanged quite a bit for what he did to evolve the game up front for forwards. It's easier to see a defenceman change the game offensively for defencemen in a time when defencemen didn't do much of anything offensively, it's a little more difficult for a forward revolutionize the game offensively because they are supposed to score points. But Gretzky managed to.

For me it's: 1 Gretzky, 2 Orr, 3 Lemieux, 4 Howe, 5 Sawchuk

I understand the arguments for Orr over Gretzky, but this is the way I see it.

And happy birthday Robert Gordon. I only wish you could have played longer.

 

Do we not care about longevity anymore? Bobby Orr at 22 might have been the perfect hockey player, sure. But Wayne Gretzky at any age from 21-30 could also be argued. Gretzky played more than twice as many games as Orr, and that's the stat that makes this lopsided.

If you were given the opportunity to have any hockey player in any era play for your team for his entire career, you'd take Gretzky without even a second thought. Orr would be behind Gordie Howe, at least, and perhaps Mario Lemieux and a few others. I'm not saying that Orr isn't better than those guys. There's a lot to be said for a brilliant prime, and Orr's was the second-best in my opinion. (Yes, I'm taking Gretzky's prime ahead of Orr's prime, too. But I take no umbrage with you arguing for Orr in that fight.)

With regards to Orr playing on one leg, have you every considered that Gretzky, sometimes the smallest guy on the ice, never seemed to get hurt seriously until he had entered his 30s? Gretzky dodged big hits, protected himself and avoided throwing down at all costs because he knew how valuable his skill was. The guy who knows how to avoid getting hurt is more valuable than the guy who plays well hurt.

 

Good arguments here, really.

Sure, Gretzky led the world juniors in scoring at 16. Back when there was only junior hockey in Canada and nowhere else, Orr was a Junior A all-star at age 14.

And, as great a scorer as Gretzky was, both Joe Malone and Newsy Lalonde retired with career goals-per-game averages of 1.2 or better. Gretzky's single-season best was "only" 1.15, and their career averages are more than double his career average of 0.6.

Malone in particular was an incredible scorer - 44 in 20 games one year, 43 in 20 on another occasion, and the only seven-goal game in NHL history.

 

Gretzky's scoring was secondary, though. And I think it's pretty tough to compare guys who played 126 and 99 games in their careers to Gretzky (or Orr or Howe or Lemieux), not that you're trying to do so.

 

I actually factored in their entire pro careers, including the NHA (same league, different name) and also the WCHL for Lalonde. Malone played 15 seasons and Lalonde played 16, so they both compare favourably to Gretzky and any other contemporary player in that regard.

 

What was scoring like in those days? I don't know my hockey history pre-Eddie Shore very well at all.

 

A lot of run and gun, to put it mildly.

Malone and another player named Harry Hyland both scored five in a game on the night the NHL got started in December 1917, and by the end of the 1920-21 season there had been 12 five-goal games. Malone had five of them and Lalonde had three.

Of those 12 games, five of them saw a player score six or more goals. All of them came in a 15-month span between January 1920 and March 1921. In the 91 years since then, there have only ever been three six-goal games.

In a game in March 1920, Montreal beat Quebec 16-3, the most goals by one team in a single game. Two months earlier, Montreal and Toronto had set another record by combining for 21 goals in a 14-7 win by Montreal. Lalonde scored six in that game, the first time it had ever been done in the NHL. Malone responded by scoring seven exactly three weeks later.

Things were almost as crazy in the NHA, perhaps crazier. Lalonde and a guy named Tommy Smith share the record there with nine goals in a game.

Smith looks to have been a freak of nature as well. In three NHA seasons starting in 1912-13, he scored 39 goals in 18 games, 39 goals in 20 games, and 40 goals in 19 games.

But Malone really was, I believe, in a class all by himself. In 1919-20 he led the league with 39 goals in 24 games for Quebec, which was an absolutely abysmal franchise. It was their first and only season in the NHL; they went 4-20 and scored only 91 times in those 24 games. So he alone scored 43 per cent of his team's goals.

When Gretzky scored 92 goals in 1981-82, that was 22 per cent of the Oilers' output that year. For him to have duplicated what Malone did in 1919-20, he'd have to have scored 92 while playing for the Colorado Rockies.