GMRwings1983

He should have knocked out Fat Albert like he did Cooke. Sign him Kenny!

Varlamov's wife must have liked that.

I want to thank Nathan MacKinnon for increasing our fight count.

You could start a thread talking about how great Todd Bertuzzi is. That's his favorite player. But no, I haven't seen him in a while either. Or am I thinking of a different poster named DraperFan?

Is Franson a lazy floater by any chance?

Nice article. Prust is one of those players that can hit, fight and occasionally score. Seems like a good teammate and leader. Basically the kind of guy Holland and Babcock don't want on this team from their past moves and their treatment of Tootoo. It's not just them not liking an enforcer who can't score. They don't really go after the Prust type players either.

I win.

LOL. That was pretty bad.

Most likely a Hall of Famer? You mean winning 3 Hart trophies isn't enough to already get him in, as well as other accolades?

Russian Sniper > American Sniper

I would love for us to have a one trick pony that scores 50 goals and shoots right handed. The two way forward thing is good too, but not mandatory when you have other guys that can fill that role. We don't have anyone who can score goals like Ovechckin. I guess nobody does except for Tampa.

Hey, I didn't know Uwe Krupp was still playing defense in the German league.

How so? A winger is not typically as good defensively as a center. It's not his game. If you look at the other top wingers ranked around Ovechkin (guys like Jagr, Lafleur, Bossy), I don't remember them being Selke candidates either. The team has failed because other than him, few guys show up in the playoffs. The Capitals historically are a bad playoff team. Apparently, one guy can't change that.

I would rank Fedorov ahead of LaFontaine, but there is no right/wrong way to rank. It's all relative to the players being compared. For instance, Turgeon scored more points than LaFontaine and played in a lot more games, but I would not rank him above LaFontaine. I hope you wouldn't either, despite your willingness to credit him for being more durable and valuable to his team. He just flat out wasn't a better player and didn't have a more relevant career to warrant a higher overall ranking. BTW, Crosby is top 5 in PPG for his career, which is incredible given the era he's playing in. He's also top 10 in playoff points per game, for those critics who think he doesn't perform in big moments.

I'm following your argument, but Joe Sakic scored 1,641 points in his career.

It would be more funny if Brodeur was named "Assistant to the Traveling Secretary"

Well, it's not like Lemieux only played 400 games in his career. Same with Lindros, Crosby and Forsberg. They've played more than enough games to be taken seriously statistically. I do rank Crosby ahead of Ovechkin because I think he's a more rounded offensive player who can score goals or rack up assists. I thought of something interesting this morning. If Ovechkin retired today, he'd be the greatest player never to have won the Stanley Cup.

Oh for sure. The goaltending is ridiculously better than it was in the 80's. Just watch some vintage games and see the kinds of goals that were given up. Hell, one doesn't even have to go back to the 80's. I was watching highlights of the 1994 Finals a year or so back, and couldn't believe how bad the goaltending was, even though Richter and McLean were considered standouts at the time. Nowadays, they'd be benched for some of those goals. I'm not the expert on extrapolation, so I can't say. I do bring up different eras frequently but hesitate to delve too much in extrapolated stats. Seems dangerous to rely too much on that.

You have to be careful with adjusted stat graphs like that. For instance, Lemieux only played a handful of games in year 10, from what I remember. I would rank Ovechkin below Bossy at this point, and way below Gretzky or Lemieux.

This sort of came up several months ago when I had a discussion in a thread about whether Datsyuk is a Hall of Famer. I said yes, even though he won't score as many points as a Turgeon, Andreychuk or Damphousse, simply because he's spent many years as one of the best players in the world and none of those players ever did. Another argument I made is that not many players in today's era will hit 1,000 points. Ovechkin will. If they play long enough, Crosby and Malkin will. But not many players drafted 2010 and later will hit 1,000. If you use that stat as a benchmark, it would mean there will be few Hall of Famers 20 years from now from today's era. But of course, that would be absurd. You can't elect all the accumulators from the 80's in the HOF and leave a Datsyuk out. We just need to change what we view as the HOF worthy benchmark stats of 500 goals and 1,000 points because it's a different era right now. Not many guys will hit those numbers. Ovechkin, though, doesn't need to worry about that. He will hit those numbers and even if he doesn't and retires tomorrow, he's already a HOF player.

All those other guys played in a more high scoring era. Ovechkin is scoring in this oversized pads, butterfly goalie era where not as many goals are scored. He has a chance to retire as one of the 5 best wingers in NHL history.

Since they've changed their name to Sabers, are they going to have lightsabers instead of swords in their logo now?

Take it easy. We're just talking about the other playoff teams in the division. But who cares about beating them, right?

Yeah, forgot about them.

Doesn't every good team in our division own the Wings? Tampa, Montreal, Boston...............not a good sign.