Happy Birthday, Bobby Orr....

Um, he holds at last count 64 NHL Records, many of which will never be broken.

To drag out the old cliche, he was playing chess while the other 600 players in the league were playing checkers.

The guy may not have had the flash and dash of an Orr but he was quite simply a creative genius on the ice.

And some of the stuff looks so breathtakingly simple--except only Gretzky could pull it off.

Think of the famous Gretzky to Lemieux goal in the '86 Canada Cup. Almost every other player would have either shot or have carried the puck in too far. A split second later and the opportunity would have passed and there'd have been no goal.

That was pure Gretzky: not flashy but he's the only guy on the ice who could have made what in retrospect was a perfect play.

 

"Absurdly inflated by the era in which he played" won't cut it. Hell, Gretzky's the biggest reason why his era was "inflated". It's like saying Babe Ruth's numbers were "inflated" by his era, because the 1920s and (especially) early 1930s had so much more offense than the Dead Ball Era. You can't knock the guy down a peg because the game changed due to the way he played it -- and the way he dominated it.

No matter how "inflated" it was in the 1980s NHL, Gretzky was still doing things nobody else had ever done. Then breaking his own records, year after year. Putting up numbers that have never been approached, before or since. Trust me, it wasn't because of his era. He played in the same era as all of his peers, and even another once-in-a-lifetime-talent like Mario didn't break his records.

And if you think his highlights weren't "dazzling" enough, I don't know what to tell you. He made passes no one's ever seen. He set up plays that no one else could envision, let alone execute. He played keep-away with the puck for minutes at a time. He set up behind the net and made rushes up the ice that were just as exquisite as Orr or Howe or Richard. He has more assists than anyone else has points! And oh yeah, more goals than anyone else, too.

Pretty dazzling to me.

 

I've never debated that point.

You said: As a defenseman, he wasn't just the MVP, he was also the scoring champ.
Can that correlate to other sports? What if Ray Lewis led the league in passing? If Roy Halladay led in hitting and home runs? If Kobe led in blocked shots and steals?

You blindly compared the game of hockey to sports in which players are responsible for one position. Defencemen may not have been expected to produce offensively until Orr 'changed the game.' But they still could.

Defensive players in football only defend, they never pass like a quarterback. AL starting pitchers never have the opportunity to contribute offensively ... unless they're in the World Series. And I don't think Toronto has even had a sniff of that opportunity since long before Halliday joined the team (sorry, JR).

You're really comparing apples to oranges.

 

Boomer obviously never saw Doug Harvey play. He INVENTED the role of rushing defenseman. Nobody did it before him.

 

Hockey fans everywhere .. gay and straight .. wish Bobby a happy B-Day (I'm guessing)

 

I hope you all realize that saying his name out loud is sacrilege. To refer to this icon, you must show four fingers and pat your heart four times.

 

JR is so old that he used to watch Newsy Lalonde and the Patrick brothers strap Sears catalogues to their shins.

 

JR saw him in peewee.

 

Just saw the following stat. Orr recorded 915 points in 657 NHL games. That's an average of 1.34 points per game.

 

Was at the 1972 All Star game and saw Orr go to his knees to block a shot. He skated off the ice in obvious pain. Bobby Hull was the shooter.

 

At the end of his career. And I was a child. So no more fuckin' age jokes.

 

That wasn't me comparing sports.